Crossan's take on the Revelation

I didn't much like Jonathan Kirsch's book on John's apocalypse - or "prophecy" as John preferred you called it. In part it's because Kirsch struck me as a bit of a jerk. Now here's John Dominic Crossan to opine upon what January Six means.

As has been said before (paraphrasing): either one approaches the Revelation a madman or one leaves it so. For my part three years and a half seems a fitting waiting-period between revisits.

Crossan argues that John must be read in the context of Nero-As-Elvis. Nero was stabbed, like the Lamb was crucified. John casts the Lamb as real where Nero was fake, alive where Nero is long dead.

Like Kirsch, Crossan sees John's book as a late-first-century Turner Diaries for para-Christian local bigots. There was no persecution, says Crossan. This was only - in John's mind - paranoia, and a lust for bloody REVENGEANCE!. Crossan is probably... right, for Domitian and Nerva. His sources are Ignatius and Pliny, who between them sketch a Christian community whom Roman governors tolerate where they toe the line.

I am less certain of Crossan about Nero. The Nero-fanclub out East can be assumed pagan and anti-Jewish (and anti-Christian). Even if John be a paranoiac of the mid AD nineties his paranoia may be post-traumatic of the sixties.

As far as other takeaways, John and the Neronians agree on hoping the Parthians will swoop in to wreck the illegitimate Flavian Imperium. They differed inasmuch as the Neronians hoped for the reinstatement of Nero. John just wanted blood; for him, only Christ is legitimate. This may explain how come the Revelation (UPDATE 3/19/23 outside the Nile) never quite got its Greek audience, much less a Syriac one. Greeks and Syrians were in the way, like to be the battlefield.

It was, counterintuitively, we the Latins who kept this book alive. (Also the Copts.) Perhaps a reaction to an increasingly Oriental Empire which culminated in Arian-then-Miaphysite Constantinople. A Nestorian Shah will save us! Prester John, anyone?

An additional point is John's take on diet; he refuses meat sacrificed to idols. When you couple that with his attacks on "Jews who are not", this means he's kosher. Here John reads like the Pseudo Clementines. And like Athanasius of Balad, as Holger Zellentin pointed out. Syriac Christendom was never much for Revelation but I am now wondering if Palaestinian Christendom may have been more receptive. More Jews, further from the Mesopotamian battlefields... closer to the Coptic and Latin north-Africa. Closer to the Hijaz too whilst we're on this beat.

Also here: John's narrative of the Lamb's birth, to the woman crowned with the twelve stars, reads like the Leto myth. There was a whole temple to Leto at the time, in Damascus. Mary-as-Leto proved popular in Syro-Palaestina, where will stand the Kathisma Church. This contradicts Luke's infancy-narrative as is well known - here, Stephen Shoemaker 2003.

Overall Crossan is set to compare John with Luke-Acts (I'm not there yet). So maybe this is all an afterclap between James and Paul, which Luke will (famously) paper over. John's "Nicolas" and "Jezebel" will be in the Paul-to-Luke faction.