John’s Gospel: A Neglected Key to Revelation?
Studies in Literary Intertextuality and Typological Interleaving between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation
Warren Austin Gage, Th.M., J.D., Ph.D.
© Warren Austin Gage, 2001
All Rights Reserved
who dreams with me of the heavenly city
The Vision of the Seven Last Angels
The Music of St John: A Symphonic Reading of the Fourth Gospel and Revelation
The Kerygmatic Imagination of St John
The Iconic Imagination of St John
On the Textual Integrity of John-Revelation
Concentric and Parallel Correspondence in Luke-Acts
In the last grand vision of the Apocalypse, John of Patmos uses unforgettable imagery to describe the consummation of all things. The heaven opens (R 19:11) and we behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon the King of Kings.1 Arrayed as a Warrior at the head of the armies of heaven, the Lord of Lords wages holy war against draconic Babylon in order to rescue His people, who constitute the New Jerusalem, His betrothed.2 The great war of heaven and earth is finished as good triumphs over evil and the city of light at last overcomes the darkness. The heavenly Jerusalem descends to earth to cover over the ruined tell of the earthly Babylon. God resolves forever the conflict of sin within the human soul as Babylon, the idolatrous, meretricious, violent, debauched, and venal, is supplanted by Jerusalem, the beloved, virginal, peaceful, festive, and free.3
John depicts the entire human enterprise as a war to the death between these two cities.4 The Seer contrasts the ethical ground of the two opposing regimes5 through the figure of two women: the whore Babylon and the bride Jerusalem.6
This book will attempt to identify John’s “Great City,” whorish Babylon, in order to understand her relationship to the Seer’s vision of the “Beloved City,” the virginal New Jerusalem. This identification is both political and philosophic. It is a political question because John tells us that it will require wisdom to identify and to understand the earthly city. “Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits” (R 17:9). It is philosophic because the reader is told he will know he has truly beheld the nature of the earthly city only when he shares John’s sense of wonder.7 “And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered greatly” (R 17:6).
In order to proceed, we should state our new modes of inquiry. This study departs explicitly from the customary orders of the historical critical method. Recent decades have witnessed the tentative emergence of a new biblical analysis that disregards conjectured redactions and imagined recensions in order to appreciate the text as we have received it simply.8 This literary challenge to the ...
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About John’s Gospel: A Neglected Key to Revelation?John’s Gospel: A Neglected Key to Revelation? explores the literary and thematic patterns—both consecutive and chiastic—that tie the fourth Gospel and Revelation together. When read as a literary diptych, the two books create a pattern of interlocking typologies. Warren Gage suggests that they were composed to interpret each other. An appendix further supports that thesis by demonstrating that the same consecutive, literary and thematic patterns are discernible in the Gospel of Luke and Acts—books generally recognized as penned by the same hand. The Logos version of John’s Gospel provides you with unique benefits available nowhere else. Scripture references appear on mouse-over and link to your preferred translation or the original-language text. This volume fully integrates into your digital library, cross-referencing to your dictionaries, commentaries, and other reference tools and allowing you to discover what other scholars and theologians have to say about the relationship between the Gospel of John and Revelation. |
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