Updated 2 years ago
The Rapture. The Antichrist. 666.
Much of what some Christians say about the End Times is not in the Bible, but is derived from various narratives, interpretations and popular media such as Jack T. Chick’s comic books that have built up over the past two centuries.
Link to Full CNN Article
Excerpts:
Revelations may be the Bible’s ultimate crossover — no other book’s imagery and language has so penetrated popular culture.
Even people who have never read the Bible are familiar with its references: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Red Dragon, 666 and the seven bowls of plague.
Revelation is filled with such contagious imagery that one theologian who has studied its text calls it a “multimedia” book whose popular images operate like an infectious disease.
“They break off from the larger text and circulate like little viruses in our culture that hook on to other things and that’s when they really take off and spread,” says Timothy Beal, author of “The Book of Revelation: A Biography.”
Beal says many people quoting Revelation get the meaning and the symbolism wrong.
“Almost none of the people talking about Revelation have really sat down and read it,” he says.
Many people, for example, believe that the “Rapture” — when it’s believed that Jesus returns at the end of the age and all Christians, dead and alive, will rise up in the air to meet him — is in Revelation.
Not true, says Beal.
There is no explicit mention of the Rapture in Revelation. There are references to the concept in scriptures like 1 Corinthians 15:52, which says,
For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
But Beal says the Rapture theory actually originated in the 19th-century work of a theologian named John Nelson Darby.
How about the Antichrist? Isn’t that in Revelation?
Nope, Beal says.
The writer of the first book of John in the New Testament warns of generic “Antichrists” who deny that Jesus is the messiah. But there is no figure like the central character in the film, “The Omen,” a cunning son of Satan with the number 666 stenciled on his body.
So what about 666 — isn’t that in Revelation?
Yes, but it doesn’t refer to Satan. Instead, theologians say the number references another incarnation of evil for the first Christians: Nero, the Roman emperor.
… invoking “end-times” biblical passages may actually bolster some people’s faith by giving meaning to events that seem cruel and arbitrary. But people who invoke the terrifying imagery of Revelation in connection with COVID-19 can do more than get scripture wrong. They can damage others’ psychological health.
…Doomsday predictions from the Bible can also lead to another danger — doing nothing, Beal says. He believes people who are seized with panic over something like Covid-19 may ignore other chronic issues threatening humanity’s survival, such as climate change.
Doing so may not be as thrilling as sharing predictions of doom. But before you decide to get in touch with your inner Nostradamus, share a kind word rather than a doomsday prediction, he says.
You’ll feel better in the end — and so will many of us who’ll need all the help we can get in the tough days ahead.
See also: We’re living an apocalyptic Stephen King novel (in reverse)
