“The whole book of Revelation is a circular letter addressed to seven specific churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea (1:11; cf. 1:4; 22:16). They are probably named in the order in which they would be visited by a… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“Theological meaning is thus written into the detail of John’s meticulous literary composition.” — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“Thus Revelation seems to be an apocalyptic prophecy in the form of a circular letter to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia.” — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“A second important sense in which Revelation stands in the tradition of the Jewish apocalypses is that it shares the question which concerned so… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“Misinterpretations of Revelation often begin by misconceiving the kind of book it is.” — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“The Old Testament allusions frequently presuppose their Old Testament context and a range of connexions between Old Testament texts which are not made explicit but lie beneath the surface of the text of Revelation. If we wonder what the average Christian in the churches of Asia could make of this, we should remember that the strongly Jewish character of most… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share
“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… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share
“[Jesus'] resurrection is therefore God's promise of new creation for the whole of the godforsaken reality which the crucified Jesus represents. It is therefore an event of dialectical promise: it opens up a qualitatively new future, which negates all the negatives of present experience. It opens up a future which is not simply drawn out of the immanent possibilities of… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share
“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… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share
“False worship, such as John portrays in the worship of the beast, is false precisely because its object is not the transcendent mystery, but… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“The point is not to predict a sequence of events. The point is to evoke and to explore the meaning of the divine judgment… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share Image
“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… — Richard Bauckham Copy Share
