Last edited Tue Apr 10, 2012, 10:58 PM - Edit history (1)
"hidden" language that any of the authorities who read it would just conclude that it was a bunch of nonsensical fantasies about "the end of the world."
That's a little different from the rationale that I usually hear, and your variation makes some sense to me. What I usually hear is that he was trying to hide his meaning from the Romans, and that just doesn't make sense to me. For example, if the Romans didn't know that Rome was the city built on seven hills (ref. Rev. 17: 9) or know their own emperor's number in the popular gematria system, then they would have to be the stupidest people who ever lived. But if, as you say, he said those things in such an over-the-top way that they'd just think it was all "nonsensical fantasies" from (my addition to your words) a crazy guy, then it's plausible.
I think it's a mistake to look at every event and/or character in Revelation as pointing to a specific analogue in real-life.
I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but if I do, then I agree about that too. By "pointing to a specific analogue in real-life," I think you mean "having a a specific meaning/interpretation as a specific event/person/group/institution/whatever in real future or history. There's so much and so much fantastical stuff that it would be thoroughly unrealistic to expect to decipher every detail or to expect that he had some specific meaning in mind for every detail. However, since you said that in the paragraph about the whole book being about Rome, I'm guessing that you mean that not every detail of Revelation needs to be identifiably about Rome. If that's what you mean, then I would respond that I only agree up to a point--I think that to claim that the whole book is about Rome, you need to identify more than the 5 or 10% of the book that is clearly about Rome. If that small a part of it is clearly about Rome, then it seems to me a much more sensible position to claim that it's only partly about Rome but also about some other stuff too.
Again, her contention that "the author was not a Christian" can be translated to "the author was not an orthodox Christian." However, I'm not too sure we can agree that the negative prophecies supposedly spoken by Christ criticizing the "seven churches" were really attacks on said orthodox Christianity. We simply don't know enough about the circumstances in those long-gone communities to know exactly what was being denounced there.
The first sentence of that paragraph says basically what I said in my second paragraph, but you said it a bit more tactfully than my "heresy wars" comment.
If she says that the messages to the seven churches were an attack on orthodoxy, then I would completely disagree with that. (Recall that I haven't actually read the book yet, only read about it.) I do think that there's some anti-orthodoxy in Revelation, but it certainly isn't a predominant theme and certainly isn't what the messages to the churches are about. BTW, Bruce Metzger's book "Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation" has some interesting historical background on those communities and their churches. (Metzger was at Princeton Theological Seminary--not sure if that is part of Princeton or a separate entity--but he was much more orthodox than Pagels. He was chair of the translation committee for the New Revised Standard Version.)
when it's a matter of orthodox Christianity versus one of the esoteric forms, she automatically has a predisposition for the latter and a bias against the former, and lets that predisposition color her scholarship.
Well, her academic specialty is the non-canonical non-orthodox writing of that time so that's naturally what she investigates. Nobody ever calls it a "bias" when orthodox scholars side with orthodoxy. If a Princeton professor had a specialty in, say, Old Testament books of prophecy that are shorter than five pages long, nobody would ever call that topic the professor's "hobby-horse."
edit: to spell Bruce Metzger's name right.
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