Spectacles of Empire

Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation

Christopher A. Frilingos

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201970
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The book of Revelation presents a daunting picture of the destruction of the world, complete with clashing gods, a multiheaded beast, armies of heaven, and the final judgment of mankind. The bizarre conclusion to the New Testament is routinely cited as an example of the early Christian renunciation of the might and values of Rome. But Christopher A. Frilingos contends that Revelation's relationship to its ancient environment was a rather more complex one. In Spectacles of Empire he argues that the public displays of the Roman Empire—the games of the arena, the execution of criminals, the civic veneration of the emperor—offer a plausible context for reading Revelation. Like the spectacles that attracted audiences from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other, Revelation shares a preoccupation with matters of spectatorship, domination, and masculinity.Scholars have long noted that in promising a complete reversal of fortune to an oppressed minority, Revelation has provided inspiration to Christians of all kinds, from liberation theologians protesting globalization to the medieval Apostolic Brethren facing death at the stake. But Frilingos approaches the Apocalypse from a different angle, arguing that Revelation was not merely a rejection of the Roman world in favor of a Christian one; rather, its visions of monsters and martyrs were the product of an empire whose subjects were trained to dominate the threatening "other." By comparing images in Revelation to those in other Roman-era literature, such as Greek romances and martyr accounts, Frilingos reveals a society preoccupied with seeing and being seen. At the same time, he shows how Revelation calls attention to both the risk and the allure of taking in a show in a society which emphasized the careful scrutiny of one's friends, enemies, and self. Ancient spectators, Frilingos notes, whether seated in an arena or standing at a distance as Babylon burned, frequently discovered that they themselves had become part of the performance.

1

Gods, Monsters, and Martyrs

What did ancient Christians find appealing about the book of Revelation, a story about the end of the world? To be sure, this text, also known as the Apocalypse, includes some of the Western world’s most enduring images. In its visions clash the “gods and monsters” of Christianity: the four riders on horseback who visit famine and disaster upon a dying world; the final battle between a multiheaded beast and the armies of heaven; and the great day of cosmic judgment that gives way to the blinding glory of a “new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). The poetical force of the book is unquestionable, great enough to obscure for many readers the details of its disturbing plot, in which the earth and its inhabitants are systematically destroyed to make room for a universe of Christian “conquerors”: “Those who conquer will inherit these things [a new heaven and a new earth]” (Rev. 21:7). A frankly imperialist narrative, Revelation predicts the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of a Christian one.¹

Many scholars, seeking to understand the book in its original context, have concluded that the shrill tone and misanthropic outlook of the Apocalypse reflected the fears of early Christians, a beleaguered minority in an environment hostile to the new religious movement. By promising an imminent reversal of fortunes, the book’s visions, like apocalyptic ideology and literature generally, responded to a collective sense of alienation. Indeed, a scholarly consensus has formed around the notion that Revelation rejects the Roman world because it speaks for a community that has cut itself off from this world: Christ and Caesar have nothing in common.²

The present study approaches the Apocalypse from a different angle, finding in its visions of monsters and martyrs desires that were formed and caught fire in the spectacles of the Roman Empire. Revelation, I shall argue, permitted its audience to do what Mediterranean populations under the empire had already been trained to do: gaze on a threatening “Other,” figured as the distant barbarians on imperial sculpture or, alternatively, as the unseemly fear that fell like a shadow over the face of a cowardly gladiator. To adapt Edward Said’s treatment of “Orientalism”: the public displays of Rome made the “Other” knowable and “To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.”³ But there are further considerations, for Revelation, no less than other expressions of Roman culture, calls attention to both the allure and the risk of “taking in” a show in a society that emphasized the careful scrutiny of one’s friends, one’s enemies, and oneself. Ancient spectators, seated in an arena or “standing far off as “Babylon” burns (Rev. 18:9), frequently discovered that they had themselves become part of the performance.

Far from being thoroughly critiqued and excluded, the values and institutions of ancient Rome left an indelible imprint upon the visions of the Apocalypse. Tradition and biblical scholarship make this a controversial proposal. That Revelation has inspired marginal groups is a matter of historical record. The book has persuaded Christians of all kinds that the world would end with a whimper and a bang, but it has proven especially attractive to antiestablishment movements. The Apocalypse was first venerated by a religious movement that suffered violent persecution under the Roman emperors. Much later, galvanized by Joachim of Fiore’s Exposition on Revelation, members of the medieval Apostolic Brethren opposed papal power and died at the stake for their insolence. In the modern era, liberation theologians have used the book to protest capitalism and globalization, while “Generation X” will long remember the siege and fiery destruction of the Waco compound of Revelation-interpreter David Koresh.⁴

To this association with radical groups biblical scholars have added the weight of their scientific findings. For much of the twentieth century, it was common for historians to situate Revelation in the context of severe Roman oppression of Christians. This setting offered a plausible explanation of the lust for revenge expressed in the book; otherwise, one scholar observed, Revelation could only be “the product of a perfervid and psychotic imagination.”⁵ Some, looking for a specific instance of persecution and finding little evidence of it under Domitian, have argued that the Christian heresiologist Irenaeus was wrong to assign the book to Domitian’s reign, and have instead pushed it back thirty years, to the days of Nero.⁶ According to Tacitus, Nero blamed Christians for the great fire of Rome, punishing some by burning them as torches to light his games.⁷ The vitriol Revelation spews against the Roman Empire is thus made comprehensible: John’s prophecy of a day when the beastly Nero would be tossed into the lake of fire expressed the outrage of early Christians.⁸

Since the 1970s, however, scholars have largely abandoned this assessment of Revelation’s purpose and the model of causality it implies. The language and imagery of the book, most scholars now agree, is far too rich to have arisen from any single moment of persecution, no matter the intensity. Attention to the genre of Revelation, in part, prompted the shift. According to a well-known scholarly definition, first published in 1979, Revelation and other ancient apocalypses belong to “a genre of revelatory literature within a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another supernatural world.”⁹ In this view, the symbols of Revelation make reference to more than actual Roman emperors; they connect Roman authority with an evil of cosmic proportions. The book was not a response to a specific episode of persecution but a translation of all human history into a struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The Apocalypse is literally a “revelation,” an uncovering of the mundane world that discloses a supernatural actuality—what is really at stake. As such, the book represents a concrete, written articulation of an ancient apocalyptic worldview that enveloped nascent Christianity.

With the appreciation of genre came a different understanding about the relationship of the book to its ancient surroundings. In the span of nine years, two influential investigations would deeply affect all subsequent research on Revelation. Neither offered a straightforward, historical-critical assessment of the book, but both introduced instead models and perspectives from the social sciences to explain the power of the Apocalypse. In a brief discussion of Revelation in Kingdom and Community, John Gager suggested that the narrative structure of the book transported early Christians out of a present experience of suffering and into a universe of power and control.¹⁰ The book accomplished a temporary “suppression of time” by presenting to its readers a series of binary oppositions, pairing images of despair, the seven bowls of wrath (Rev. 16:1–20), for example, with images of hope, in this case, worship in heaven (Rev. 19:1–16). The “rhythmic oscillation” between these images exposed the transitory nature of the “here and now,” enabling the audience to rise above the conflicts of the present and to pass for a moment into the millennial bliss of the future. The effect, though, was short-lived: the “real world” stubbornly asserted itself again into the lives of early Christians. In sum, Gager argued that the book of Revelation offered to early Christians a myth that temporarily eased the tension between “what ought to be and what is.”

In Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse, Adela Yarbro Collins likewise maintained that the driving force behind Revelation was the tension between “what was and what ought to have been.”¹¹ But where Gager insisted on Roman persecution as the main source of this tension, Collins introduced the remarkably supple notion of “relative deprivation”: whether or not the officials of Rome arrested, tortured, or killed Christians, John and his readers felt oppressed, and this perspective colored every aspect of life.¹² She argued that Revelation created a “crisis” out of widespread exasperation with Rome, enhanced this rancor, and then resolved it.¹³ Like Gager, Collins paid close attention to the structure of Revelation; but unlike Gager, Collins eschewed structuralism and employed a model of “recapitulation” to make plain the “power of the Apocalypse.” Revelation, she argued, used different images in a series of repetitions: the breaking of the seven seals (Rev. 6:1–8:5) is recapitulated in the seven trumpets (Rev. 8:6–11:19), and again, in the seven bowls of wrath (Rev. 15:1–16:21). The purpose of these violent repetitions was to sharpen the deep-seated resentment of the audience by playing upon the community’s hatred of Rome, Jews, and rival Christian groups. “Catharsis” was delivered to the audience through Revelation’s final visions of judgment and a “new glorious mode of existence” for the faithful, ameliorating the disquiet evoked elsewhere in the narrative.¹⁴

Other scholars have offered their own versions of “crisis and catharsis.” According to Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, early Christians faced not governmental persecution but social ostracization, which the book’s “symbolic universe” enabled readers to transcend.¹⁵ For Leonard Thompson, the Apocalypse established boundaries between the “deviant knowledge” of his Christian community and the pagan “cognitive majority,” boundaries that did not yet exist in the urban environment of Asia Minor.¹⁶ More recently, scholars have focused on sectarian rivalry as the principal force behind Revelation’s strange images: “The crisis of the Apocalypse is a crisis of authority within Christian circles,” contends Robert Royalty, a thesis echoed by the recent work of Paul Duff.¹⁷ The book opens with messages to churches in seven cities in Roman Asia Minor, and in these communities, Christians such as “Jezebel” in Thyatira (Rev. 2:20) and the “Nicolaitans” in Pergamum (2:15), stood at odds with John’s understanding of Christianity.¹⁸ John’s hatred of Rome was secondary; his hatred of his opponents was primary.¹⁹

A range of solutions has thus been put forward to explain the apparent alienation of John’s community. Yet, underneath this diversity lies a common modus operandi: nearly all recent treatments of the book have first identified the circumstances that led to the composition of Revelation and have then interpreted the book in light of these circumstances. Each has proceeded, in other words, from motivation to meaning, linking the appeal of the book to external or internal points of stress that the book somehow resolved. In an unlikely development, “crisis” has served as the therapy for an anxiety (lurking, we might say, in the unconscious of critical scholarship), namely, the fear that Revelation was indeed the “product of a perfervid and psychotic imagination.” What else could be responsible for this strange text but “relative deprivation,” “deviant knowledge,” or, more recently, a “crisis of authority”?

This is not at all to suggest that these explanations are without merit.²⁰ On the contrary, these and other models of social interaction have greatly advanced the study of Revelation. But the net effect of theories such as “relative deprivation” and “deviant knowledge” has been to isolate John and his community, separating Revelation from the Roman world. Thompson, for example, concluded that Revelation reflects a “minority that continuously encounters and attacks the larger Christian community and the even larger Roman social order.”²¹ So too other suggestions for tethering the text to the ancient Mediterranean world have paradoxically driven a wedge between Revelation and the society of the early empire, a setting that has often been described according to fairly narrow categories or been made subordinate to other concerns.²² The present study, by contrast, does not undertake a new quest for the ideological, psychological, and sociological factors that compelled the seer John to pen Revelation. Rather than developing a theory of origins, I attempt to read the book of Revelation as a cultural product of the Roman Empire, a book that shared with contemporaneous texts and institutions specific techniques for defining world and self.

Symmetry in the treatment of Revelation and the Roman Empire is a primary methodological objective of the present study. It seeks to describe the ambiguities of life under the Roman Principate and to read Revelation as a narrative exploration of these ambiguities. I assume that texts are participants in the fashioning of culture and subjectivity and not merely statements of preexisting ideologies or worldviews. I do not challenge the hypothesis that John resented Roman rule, nor the argument that John wished to construct or maintain “high” boundaries between nascent Christianity and paganism. Nor do I dispute the thesis that apocalypticism served as an ideology of resistance for ancient Jews and Christians, including John.²³ In sum, I do not wish to contest the notion that apocalyptic elements were part and parcel of early Christianity, but I do contest the idea that these are the only elements that matter for grasping the appeal of Revelation. Rather than cast the relationship between this text and Roman culture in oppositional terms, I seek to discern the power of the Apocalypse for subjects of the Roman Empire by embedding the book in this empire, more specifically, by relating the appeal of the book to ancient preoccupations with viewing and the achievement of masculinity. To the further elaboration of the key terms and theoretical underpinnings of this study we now turn.

Figures and Focus

“Monsters and martyrs” here designates two (sometimes overlapping) character types in the book of Revelation. “Monsters” covers a wide range of grotesque characters, from the evil dragon to the beasts to the prostitute Babylon. For the early Christian audience, we shall see, one monster rose above the others, the Lamb “standing as if slain.”²⁴ “Martyr” (όμάρτυς), or “witness,” holds diverse connotations in the Apocalypse. It is associated with figures whose sufferings are linked—by narrative proximity, at least—to their “witness” to Christ and God, as in the reference to Antipas, “my martyr” (Rev. 2:13) and in the story of the two prophets, “my two martyrs” (Rev. 11:1–14). Yet, as Adela Yarbro Collins observes, “martys is not yet a technical term meaning ‘martyr’ in Revelation.”²⁵ In this study, μάρτυς relates chiefly to examples of viewing in the narrative. The many characters of Revelation repeatedly act as spectators: here “witnessing” the demise of Babylon, there gazing at the wonders of the beast. If the Lamb was the most compelling monster for ancient Christian audiences, Christ, “the faithful witness” (Rev. 1:5), in various guises (including the Lamb), I will argue, surfaced as the most...