Kill one man, you’re a murderer. Kill several, you’re a psycho. A thousand and you’re a hero. Millions and you’re a conqueror. Kill off everything, and you are God!

The Revelation of Jesus 2

Lion or Lamb
Essenes
Four Horsemen
An Interlude
Apocalypse
Salvation from the East
Pilate’s 3½
The Beast

Abstract

The myth of Jesus is convincingly explained from the historical fact of apocalyptic fervour among some Jews in the first century. Jesus obviously thought the end of the world was due and that it was his duty to help defeat the cosmic forces of evil by defeating them here on earth. The forces of evil to Jews at the time were their idolatrous Roman oppressors, and the Jews who collaborated with them. If the seven epistles and the epilogue are removed from Revelation, and obvious cosmetic additions made by Christians, such as blasphemous references to Jesus as God also, what remains is a Jewish apocalypse—nothing less than the beliefs of Jesus. If Christianity began with an apocalyptic Jewish sect, it would hardly be surprising that it had an eschatological tradition and mythology behind it. The Jewish sect was the Essenes, who saw themselves as prophets because they were forever watching for signs of the end of the world.

Lion or Lamb

Chapter 5 brings us back in touch with scriptural precedents. God has a scroll in His right hand but no one is willing to break the seven seals on it and open it. The Watcher wept in sorrow, but was comforted by an Elder who says:

Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

This is most interesting and valuable for the interpretaion of the rest of the piece. The saviour who breaks the seals and opens the book is none other than the expected Messiah described as the Lion of Judah. Furthermore, he has again “prevailed” or “conquered”, the theme of “nasah” again.

The most interesting point is the hero being a lion. Heroes are normally lions, if any animal, but in the rest of the apocalypse, the lion has become a lamb! There can be little doubt that every lamb in this apocalypse was originally a lion! The Aramaic for a mature lion is “ari” and it has passed into Greek as a loan word. In this gospel, the Greek word for lamb is “arnion”. Plainly the original ari has been changed into arnion thoughout the book. It explains why the unusual word arnion should be used rather than the more usual amnos. Admittedly, the lion of Judah is a leon not an ari, but “the Lamb of Judah” meant nothing so arnion could not have been substituted here. Instead of changing ari to arnion, a literate gentile editor made it into leon severing the connexion between the words when most Christians had become gentiles.

The animal was some sort of Persian or Babylonian sphinx or griffin, perhaps a ram-headed lion with seven horns and eyes, and the seven spirits of God—the Persian personified qualities of God that became the seven Jewish archangels.

The effect of messing about with lions and lambs is that the lion of verse 5:5 that opened the scroll is a dead lamb in verse 5:6, a Christian rationalisation—how can a dead lamb take the scroll? If this were meant to be a revelation to the messiah as we suspect, the Watcher took the scroll.

Essenes

Revelation 5:8-10 has marked references to the Essenes, called the saints:

And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints. And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.

The Essenes did not offer sacrifice but preferred blessings and prayer as a sweet savour or odour for god. Parallels like this cannot be explained away. The “new song” is met in Psalms 144:9 and Isaiah 42:10. Both are proper messianic songs referring to conquest of the nations and mighty Jewish victories over their enemies. Here, later Christians have replaced the original with a reference to Christ’s apparent death and resurrection, but originally the blood was that of the peoples of the nations, not Jesus’s. Pacifism has no part of any of the process, whether expressed in the original songs or the rest of Revelation taken, by Christians still, to be prophetic though they are supposed to be pacific people themselves!

The Jews were prophesying a mighty warrior sent by god to defeat their enemies. The only way that Jesus could have been attached to these prophesies is if he had seemed to have fulfilled them. He must have won a military victory over the Romans. The result was to be that the victors, originally righteous Jews then later Christians, would rule the world as kings and priests. The Essenes considered themselves to have begun this process—they were priests and they were princes.

Four Horsemen

When the seals on the scroll are successively opened, each gives a vision as a sign of some event leading up to the End Time when God made his judgement—an ancient Zoroastrian idea. Jews expected such signs and Essenes claimed also to have the prophetic ability of reading these signs. Jesus, in the gospels, was constantly asked for “a sign”. The Book of Revelation explains why. The Watcher, who is the Messiah, has had all of these signs revealed by the angels and elders of heaven. These visions were a collection of the signs the Essenes expected to signify the coming End. Though written before the time of Jesus, it was altered almost 100 years after his death.

The mysterious visions accompanying each seal are taken from the apocalypses of Zechariah, whose prophesy of a heavenly host emerging from the Mount of Olives, Jesus was expecting in the Garden of Gethsemane—the reward for the righteous Jews that had defeated the usurper of God, Rome. The sources used here are not uniformly the Septuagint as was usual for Christians, being predominantly none-Hebrew speaking gentiles. This is more proof that the work is pre-Christian.

When the “first” seal (not “one of the seals”) was opened the Watcher is presented with a vision of the four horsemen, apparently using the four judgements of Ezekiel 14:21:

Saith the Lord God; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast.

The Essenes were not inhibited in interpreting scripture and the matching of the four judgements with the four horses and chariots of Zechariah did not have to be precise. Indeed, though the four seem to represent different afflictions, the Essenes will have seen them all as being eponyms for God’s enemies rather than having semantic meaning. “Noisome beasts” can hardly have been a serious problem in Jerusalem, but they were if the expression meant beastly people like Greeks and Romans.

A white horse was used in the ceremonial triumphs of victorious Roman generals. Red is the colour of blood and the red horseman wielded a sword. Those wielding a sword in Jerusalem at the time were surely Greeks and Romans, and we can guess that pestilence and famine both meant foreign invaders too.

The black horse is famine, the scales suggesting rationing not justice, and food prices of about ten times normal suggesting exploitation to the point of starvation—this was not any natural famine. Moreover, just as scales represent justice today, they were the symbols of Roman magistrates, as too were ears of corn! The magistrates would have been responsible for distributing dole during famines. The command of a voice not to hurt oil and wine sounds like a Christian interpolation from the time of Domitian.

The pale or green horse should have been pestilence but is assigned to death, and even eternal death, being associated with hell. The reference to this horseman having a “quarter of the earth” could have meant originally a “quarter of the land”, meaning the land of Herod the king. Judaea was a quarter of the land of Herod, the other parts being Galilee, Gaulanitis and Peraea, and had been taken in direct rule by Rome in 6 AD. Thus the pale horseman was expressly Roman and metaphorically killed like the “beasts of the earth”.

In 1 Enoch 47, the “martyrs” are a sacrifice to God and the End will come when the roll of martyrs is complete. The fifth seal depicts the Christian martyrs as sacrifices to God. Martyrs are “witnesses”, or perhaps “watchers”, but are certainly the dead saints or perfectly holy men that “slept” until they were resurrected into the kingdom of God—in the literature of Enoch popular at Qumran. White robes signified the incorruptible body of resurrection. They were under an alter and dressed in white robes calling for vengeance. This shows they were Essene and not Christian saints. Christians have always claimed they forgave and did not require revenge. The pre-Christian source also shines through in their calling to the “despot”, or slave master of the universe, rather than to Christ. They wanted to know “how long” before they were avenged, and were assured they need only rest “a little while longer”.

The cosmic events of the Sixth seal seem to be partly allusions to the Jewish scriptures, but mountains represent world states like Assyria and Babylon or, at the time of Jesus, Rome.

An Interlude

Chapter seven is a parenthesis that is substantially Essene. Four angels are poised to unleash the elements against the earth but a fifth one ascending from “the rising of the sun” tells them to wait until God’s slaves—the despot’s slaves—had been sealed on their foreheads. Branding slaves on their forehead was a Roman practice.

The god of heaven of the Persians and the Hebrews naturally had a sun aspect and this was respectively personified as the rising sun, Mithras (Mica), and the archangel Michael. Essenes prayed to the rising sun and held it in reverence. They believed the righteous would be saved from the “angels of the Lord” when they unleashed justice upon the earth.

In his vision, Jesus saw 12,000 saints sealed for each of the twelve tribes—144,000 in all. The vision reveals that, after the saints of the remnant of Israel, the holy ones of all the nations of the earth then came, waving palm branches symbolic of victory. The victory they symbolised came to be seen as the victory of the Nazarenes over the Roman garrison of Jerusalem, without which Jesus could never have entered the city as a king or captured the temple.

In Revelation 7:10, “and to the lamb” has been added. Jewish referents have been replaced by “the lamb” at the end of the first century to Christianise this otherwise Essene work. The tribulation of verse 7:14 is associated with the “Abomination of Desolation” (Dan 9:27), the definitive marker of the coming End. Plainly the Essenes saw themselves as being bloodied saints, but the reference to the robes being white in blood invokes the imagery of the scapegoat sent out into the wilderness to lift the sins of the nation.

The final verses of the chapter give an Essene vision of heaven and therefore how they tried to live on earth, since they seemed to think of themselves as a bridgehead of heaven on earth. They felt obliged to praise God “night and day” and they arranged rostas allowing God to be offered continuous prayer and songs of blessing or thanksgiving. The “springs of living waters” of verse 7:17 remind us of the springs at En Gedi that the Essenes seemed to think were the first trickles of healing water in the river flowing from the alter of Ezekiel’s idealized temple, presumably the heavenly one mentioned elsewhere in Revelation and the one built “without hands” on the third day.

Apocalypse

The interlude over, in 8:1 the Watcher resumes his observance of the opening of the seals. The short silence at the beginning is reminiscent of a lull before a storm and is meant to remind the righteous that such a lull would not mean the End had been postponed.

Persian influence is again clear in 8:2 where God has his traditional seven angels, the Jewish inheritance of the seven Amesha Spentas of Ahura Mazda, transferred to Yehouah worship by Ezra and similar Persian administrators of Judah.

Similarly in Esther, seven Persian Princes that were allowed to face the king are mentioned. In this allegory, the king is the Most High God, so the seven allowed to face the Jewish God are the seven archangels, really aspects of Him, like the Amesha Spentas of Ahura Mazda. Thus, Tobit 12:15 identifies Raphael as one of the seven holy angels that go into the presence of the glory of God. Tobit, like Esther, is manifestly Persian. Enoch 30 names six of these “angels who watch” and Raphael, Gabriel and Michael are among them. In Revelation 8, each of the angels has a trumpet, reminding us vividly of the Qumran War Scroll. Trumpets are an eschatological symbol of God’s judgement.

Then “another” angel appears in the role of High Priest, though the context is again plainly Essene, there being no hint at sacrifice but instead incense and the prayers of the saints are offered. An eighth angel might symbolise the eighth day of creation when God ceased from his rest to create the incorruptible world, at least in later Jewish tradition. So the eighth angel might represent the messiah and the Christians saw Christ as the heavenly High Priest. Yet, Essenes and Christians alike seem to see Christ in the form of the archangel Michael, at least in their vision of his coming, whether it was a first coming as the Essenes thought, or the second coming the Christians invented to explain the initial death of their messiah.

The action of this eighth angel ensures the safety of the saints—the Essenes—before fire is rained upon the earth. For Christians the character of the messiah is pacific—that of a lamb—and it seems possible that the eighth angel disguises the fact that the messiah was expected to rain retribution upon the unrighteous people who remained on the earth after he had called up the saints. Originally, the eighth angel would have been the Lion of Judah assisting God in his creative efforts by destroying the unrighteous so that an uncorruptible world could begin.

If though, there were only seven archangels, the Lion of Judah and the eighth angel must have been one of them, and the one he would have been was Michael, the leader of God’s retributive armies (hosts). The Lion of Judah was the archangel Michael who was the protector of the Jewish nation. Revelation is more compatible with the Essene belief that Michael would come with the heavenly hosts, than the Christian idea that it would be Jesus. Jesus himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, was expecting the angelic hosts to come, and relics of the idea remain in the gospels. The death of Jesus obliged Christians to invent the second coming with Jesus in Michael’s original role.

What follows is strikingly reminiscent of the War Scroll, with each angel sounding a loud trump to add to the calamities on earth. Each time a trumpet was sounded a third of the earth (again possibly “land” originally) is destroyed by fresh disasters. Since there are more than three trumpets, these thirds are not meant ot be different thirds. They signified the Roman third of the kingdom of Herod—Judaea and unrighteous collaborating Jews—the other two tetrachies of Philip and Antipas being acceptable by comparison. Consistency was not an Essene strong point and indeed they delighted in riddles or “mysteries” so the different divisions of the kingdom of Herod into thirds or quarters, they would not have seen as a problem, though they might suggest a mixing of original sources.

The great burning mountain cast into the sea is the might of Rome just as in Jeremiah 51:25 it was Babylon and, in Mark 11:23, Jesus is referring to the same mountain though it is not yet burning. It was a convention to use Babylon for Rome, part of the Essene code necessitated for their own safety—to keep the Romans in the dark if they should discover any of their material, and to allow them to preach openly but “parabolically”. Babylon and the mountain are parabolic allusions to Rome.

Salvation from the East

The beginning of the next chaper introduces us to the “Abyss”, yet another concept from Persian religion. The Abyss in Persian religion is full of demons and here they appear in the form of scorpions to torture the unrighteous so badly they wish for death. Possibly there has been some tampering with the Essene original here because the army of demons is described quite favourably and is doing the work of God. They sound like the Parthians whom the writers of this work seemed to regard as allies against Rome, or even the saints themselves. The Parthians were, of course, the successors of the Persian empire and were Rome’s most dangerous enemies. They seemed therefore natural allies of the Essenes but here are depicted as demons. Later, the gentile Christians would not have wanted to show they favoured Rome’s enemies, and perhaps some changes were made. The added Greek name (Apollyon) might also suggest this. Both Abaddon and Apollyon mean destruction or eternal death for the Essenes, but Abaddon could be read as the “Father’s Strength!”

Revelation 9:14, clarifies this when four angels bound in the Euphrates are ordered to be loosed, and a mighty army issues forth. The Essenes who were more clearly identified with Persia than any other Jewish sect, obviously expected salvation to come from the east, beyond the Euphrates, Parthia, the direction of the morning sun. For the Essenes, God’s armies would come from the east—literally! Again, the fraction one third is repeated, suggesting the third of the land that was Romanised.

In Revelation 10:1, an angel arrives who is, from his description, the archangel Michael, a Jewish personification of the retribution of God. Verse 10:3 confirms from his lion-like roar that he is also the Lion of Judah.

In Revelation 10:4, the Watcher understands the messages of thunder. The allusion here is to a system of prediction, considered then to be part of astrology, using thunder to foresee the future. The Essenes were experts in this form of fortune telling as we know from the brontologions of Qumran, books of tables relating the positions of the constellations when thunder is heard on any particular day. Further links with the Essenes are found in verse 10:7 when the expressions “mysteries of God” and “his slaves the prophets” are found. Essenes in particular were concerned with the “mysteries of God”, which they thought they could interpret by careful study of the scriptures and for this reason they saw themselves as the successors of the legendary prophets. The End Time is here. The angel in verse 10:6 promises no more delay, seemingly an answer to the sacrificed saints who wanted vengeance. In Daniel 12:7 the delay had been a time, two times and a half a time, but this mysterious number does soon turn up in Revelation.

The curious mention of the Watcher eating the scroll, which tasted like honey but was bitter to the stomach, might be an echo of the bees and honeycomb of Joseph and Aseneth. Essenes were reputed to have kept bees among their other skills, but the ritual or symbolic meaning of bees in their world view is not clear except that they were traditionally considered to be creatures of the sun.

Pilate’s 3½

In Chapter 11 we see how silly it is to imagine that the Watcher was John, the putative author and disciple of Jesus, the creator of a new universal or catholic religion. If John had any role, it was that he related the vision of Jesus—or more probably some earlier Essene Righteous Teacher—that then became standard Essene apocalyptic. The Watcher, Jesus as far as the narrator knew, was instructed to measure the temple but omit the court of the gentiles! All the universalist insertions by Christian editors are negated by this fact. Indeed, the court of the gentiles was blamed for the gentiles treading the holy city underfoot for 42 months—seemingly the mysterious period of time of Daniel.

Gentile Christians quickly learned to obscure, knowingly or otherwise, every reference to the pre-Christian Nazarenes and Essenes that they could, to curry favour with the Roman authorities. The meanings of many contemporary allusions have therefore been irretrievably lost. What is clear is that the time period was taken to be an important sign of the coming End and it was associated with the Abomination of Desolation, or desecration of the temple by foreigners.

Pilate entered Jerusalem clandestinely with his soldiers at the start of his governorship. No word now remains that he desecrated the temple but it seems impossible to believe he did not. Otherwise, what was the purpose of his furtive entry into Jerusalem, and how could he purloin the temple Corban, as he did, without desecrating it? The leadership of the Essenes when this happened will have considered it a major sign that the End would come after the 42 months specified in Daniel. They would therefore have started a campaign expected to conclude with the arrival of the heavenly host, 3½ years later. This is the campaign that brought martyrdom and deification to the Essene leader of the time, Jesus the Nazarene.

The two witnesses also prophesy a period of 42 months of tribulation before the End (1260 days—an Essene month was 30 days long). Jewish law required two witnesses. The witnesses will have been Moses and Elijah as they were at the Transfiguration, but they will in reality have been Essene leaders for they have the powers of retribution. They had power over the rain as did Onias the Rainmaker.

The Satanic beast in Revelation 11:7 emerging from the bottomless pit is, as ever, Rome and it makes war against the two witnesses showing that they symbolise the Righteous—the Essenes. These verses up to Revelation 11:10 are highly interesting, if this is a pre-Christian work. They prophesy something close to the story of Jesus—but not quite! The differences are sufficient to exclude the passage as a Christian insertion.

The two witnesses are killed in the Roman attack and lie in the street of the Great City, not entombed for 3½ days not three. The Great City is called Sodom and Egypt, both of which there are grounds for thinking the Essenes might have used as code names for their own “city” at Qumran. Meanwhile their enemies rejoice. The phrase “Our Lord Jesus Christ” is introduced to make the reader identify the city of Sodom or Egypt with Jerusalem. Then in 11:11-12, the two corpses, after 3½ not three days, are resurrected and ascend to heaven in full view of everyone, including their enemies. The second woe is completed with an earthquake and many deaths. All this is so close to the Christian myth that it is hard to see why the writers of Revelation if they are Christians should have wanted to introduce mytholocgy so close to, yet different from, the original. It is easier to think that this is the original [†]

Menehem. See the account in this directory of Menehem.

The sounding of the seventh trumpet brings the declaration in heaven that the kingdom of God has begun. Finally, the heavenly temple opened and the Ark of the Covenant was once more revealed. Jewish mythology had it that the Ark would be returned to the heavenly temple. This is even more proof that we are not reading a Christian composition. Christians saw the church as their temple, as did the Essenes—on earth—but they, unlike Christians, still believed that a temple would be restored in the incorruptible, perfect kingdom of God.

The Beast

Chapter 12 seems to be dissociated from what went before. The reason is that the archangel Michael is now openly the heavenly saviour not Jesus (the lamb). It continues to be heavily indebted to Persian religion and perhaps other Mesopotamian mythologies, and might have been added from another Essene source after the compiler had put together the rest of the book.

The heavenly woman in travail must have originally been Israel personified and not the virgin Mary. She is depicted like Ishtar or Isis but the symbolism of the twelve stars, sun amd moon, will have been seen as appropriate to Israel, certainly by the Essenes who were interested in astrology.

The dragon that swept down a third of the stars is Rome regarded as Satan. In the Psalms of Solomon, Pompey is called the Dragon. The Dragon threatens Israel and her child, the messiah who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, a severity inappropriate to the metaphor of a lamb.

Bearing in mind the Persian origins of much of this, the myth is obviously an adaptation of the birth of Marduk and the threats of the dragon, Tiamat. Bel Marduk was the Babylonian god but was adopted by the Persians as a local variant of their own god of heaven, Ahura Mazda, just as Yehouah was. The woman fled into the wilderness for 1260 days, proving that she was not just Israel, but the righteous remnant of Israel—the Essenes themselves and their repentant followers. She escapes again in 12:14. Verses like 12:15-16 seem to be elements of the myth of Marduk and Tiamat retained as symbolic of God’s victory over evil.

Revelation 12:7 gives the cosmic battle between the hosts of Satan and the heavenly hosts led by the archangel Michael (Dan 12:1). The hosts of Satan on earth are the Romans who have to be beaten to defeat the Dragon finally. In fact, the archangel Michael defeats the Dragon in heaven and despatches him to earth to continue his disruption until his ultimate defeat on earth.

The description of the beast in Chapter 13 is from Daniel 7. The seven headed dragon is Babylonian and there is no necessity to see emperors in the heads. The ten diadems on the other hand plainly represent kings or kingdoms and imply that the monster is a world state. The blasphemous name (Rev 13:1) dates the composition fairly precisely to the first Caesar that openly adopted a divine name—Caesar Augustus means the Venerable, Worshipful or Divine Caesar. Later Caesars claimed divinity more insistingly, but Augustus was the first of them to claim divinity by name. In Revelation 13:4, men worshipped the beast because Roman Emperors from Augustus claimed divinity—they were worthy of veneration or worship.

The beasts’s mortal wound that was healed must mean the civil war between Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) and Antony, won by Octavian thus healing the wound and actually strengthening the monster, Augustus being a most competent ruler. F C Jenning comments:

There had been such a political convulsion, such an upheaval of the understrata of the social fabric, as had overturned all authorities beyond the possibility of recovery, apart from supernatural intervention. The devil picked up the fallen prince from the dust of death, infused a new spirit—his own spirit—into him.

From the vantage point of Egypt, Antony and Cleopatra perhaps looked invincible and the Orient looked to the defeat of Rome. Octavian’s victory looked then like the work of Satan.

The mouth speaking blasphemies might well be a reference to Caiaphas, who took power over the civil authorities in Judaea at the same time that Pilate took over the governorship, or to Pilate himself, bringing the narrative up to date at the time when Jesus undertook his 3½ years campaign against Rome (note the expression emphasising this in Revelation 13:9). Evidently he made war on the saints and overcame them recalling the defeat of the Nazarenes but then the tables were turned in an Essene sounding passage (Rev 13:10). The reference to the Book of Life is yet another Persian feature.

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Last uploaded: 12 May, 2008.