2025 Readings 26

 I've been listening to Craig Koester's Great Courses lectures on The Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in Western Civilization. Like most, although not all, of the Great Courses it's been fantastic. I chose it for a few reasons. I tend to listen to a lot of Great Courses on religious themes - or a bunch of podcasts on religion - and obviously books on religion, so this is not a surprising choice. Plus, this deep dive into the Apocalypse and the Book of Revelation was interesting to me because I think it impacted the Islamic view of the end times more than we realize or at least want to admit. Plus, I'm trying to understand the increasingly radical Christian base, who have an outsized influence on policy. It's not enough to simply ignore them or make fun of them. On some level I feel I have to understand where they're coming from, even if I dramatically disagree with them (which I do).  Essentially, is there something in their view of the Apocalypse and a general fascination with the Book of Revelation that explains their worldview - and is there something in that worldview that is revealed in the message of Trump and so many GOP politicians. One of the things that I got out of it, which I already knew quite clearly from readings too many Bart Ehrman books, is that we should not take the Book of Revelation as a predictor of the end times. I guess I always knew this, but once you get into the serious scholarship it is so astonishingly clear that it isn't about that at all - and, truthfully, if you, living today, think that someone living two thousand years ago was predicting the events of your own age, then that speaks more about your own vanity and self-absorption. Rather, the Book of Revelation, like the other Apocalypses that didn't make it into the New Testament, was a metaphoric reflection on the age that John (although not that John, just someone who took that an important name associated with early followers of Jesus, a common phenomenon at the time - which is also the case with the more famous Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John). Even the name Apocalypse simply means something like "disclosure" as compared to the end of the world meaning that we associate with it today (which makes me want to ask Francis Ford Coppola if that was his hidden meaning in entitling his Vietnam film). Consequently, on the one hand I was probably too willing to simply discount the Book of Revelation, but Koester did a wonderful job laying out the beauty of the metaphoric message, and that it was as much a call for justice as anything else, which would actually make it a great fit for Islam. The second half of the lengthy lecture series focused on the influence of the Book of Revelation over the centuries, which was also interesting and important. Anyway, highly recommended.