Into the Apocalypse
With an Unruffled Tour Guide
By
DWIGHT GARNER
MARCH
20, 2012
How well should a
historian write? That’s a complicated question, but it’s hard to
disagree with George Orwell, who thought that any exemplary book
should not only be an intellectual but “also an aesthetic
experience.”
Elaine Pagels, a
professor of religion at Princeton, possesses a calm, sane, supple
voice. It’s among the reasons readers have stuck with her over a
nearly four-decade career, often on hikes through arduous territory,
like her commentary on ancient Christian works that were banned from
the Bible. She’s America’s finest close reader of apocrypha. Ms.
Pagels is best known for “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), which won
a National Book Award and was named one of the best 100
English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern
Library. That book spawned a million biblical conspiracy theories, as
well as “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown’s hyperventilating
novel. Few seem to hold that against her.
The cool authority
of Ms. Pagels’s voice serves her almost too well in her new volume,
“Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of
Revelation.” She surveys this most savage and peculiar book of the
New Testament — an ancient text that is nonetheless, as the
novelist Will Self has put it, “the stuff of modern, psychotic
nightmares” — as if she were touring the contents of an English
garden. She’s as unruffled as the heroine of “Buffy the Vampire
Slayer,” who declared in one of that excellent television show’s
best episodes, “If the apocalypse comes, beep me.”
Her “Revelations”
is a slim book that packs in dense layers of scholarship and meaning.
The Book of Revelation, attributed by Ms. Pagels to John of Patmos,
is the last book in the New Testament and the only one that’s
apocalyptic rather than historical or morally prescriptive. It’s a
sensorium of dreams and nightmares, of beasts and dragons. It
contains prophecies of divine judgment upon the wicked and has
terrified motel-room browsers of the Gideon Bible for decades.
Ms. Pagels places
the book in the context of what she calls “wartime literature.”
John had very likely witnessed the skirmishes in A.D. 66, when
militant Jews, aflame with religious fervor, prepared to wage war
against Rome for both its decadence and its occupation of Judea.
She deepens her
assessment of the Book of Revelation by opening with a troubled
personal note.
“I began this
writing during a time of war,” she says, “when some who advocated
war claimed to find its meaning in Revelation.”
Because he feared
reprisals, John wrote this condemnation of Rome in florid code.
He “vividly evokes
the horror of the Jewish war against Rome,” Ms. Pagels writes.
“Just as the poet Marianne Moore says that poems are ‘imaginary
gardens with real toads in them,’ John’s visions and monsters are
meant to embody actual beings and events.” For example, most
scholars now agree, she says, that the “number of the beast,”
666, spells out Emperor Nero’s imperial name.
The so-called
Gnostic Gospels, the subject of Ms. Pagels’s breakthrough book,
were discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt. At that site
scholars also found dozens of other previously unknown books of
revelation. Among this volume’s central questions, then, is this
one: How did John’s book of revelation become the only one included
in the New Testament?
Ms. Pagels
approaches this question from many angles but agrees with those
scholars who have suggested that John’s revelations were less
esoteric than many of the others, which were aimed at a spiritual
elite. John was aiming at a broad public.
The others, she
writes, “tend to prescribe arduous prayer, study and spiritual
discipline, like Jewish mystical texts and esoteric Buddhist
teachings, for those engaged in certain kinds of spiritual quest.”
What’s more, she
writes, because John’s revelations end optimistically, in a new
Jerusalem, not in total destruction, they speak not just to what we
fear but also to “what we hope.”
John’s visions,
throughout the centuries, have been applicable to almost every
conflict or fit of us-against-the-world madness. Charles Manson read
the Book of Revelation before his followers’ rampages; Hitler,
encouraged by Joseph Goebbels, apparently read himself into the
narrative as a holy redeemer, while the rest of the civilized world
saw him as the book’s beast.
For a work that
contemplates a hell made on earth, Ms. Pagels’s book rarely
produces much heat of its own. It drifts above the issues like an
intellectual satellite.
One of her great
gifts is much in abundance, however: her ability to ask, and answer,
the plainest questions about her material without speaking down to
her audience. She often pauses to ask things like, “Who wrote this
book?” and “What is revelation?” and “What could these
nightmare visions mean?” She must be a fiendishly good lecturer.
The Book of
Revelation is not prized as being among the best-written sections of
that literary anthology known as the New Testament, but Ms. Pagels is
alive to how its language has percolated through history and
literature. Jesus, who appears on a white horse to lead armies of
angels into war, will “tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath
of God,” John wrote.
This image emerges
again in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Union’s anthem
during the Civil War: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the Lord;/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of
wrath are stored.”
John’s book has
caused great mischief in the world, Ms. Pagels suggests, but it is a
volume that can be clasped for many purposes. It has given comfort to
the downtrodden, yesterday and today.
John, Ms. Pagels
writes, “wants to speak to the urgent question that people have
asked throughout human history, wherever they first imagined divine
justice: How long will evil prevail, and when will justice be done?”
REVELATIONS
Visions, Prophecy,
and Politics in the Book of Revelation
By Elaine Pagels
246 pages. Viking.
$27.95.
