#84 A Scholar Puts Revelation into Context + Dr Jon Paulien

Today we're going to talk about Revelation, and not Revelation in the way that we have in the past.

Revelation's own title is given in the very first verse. It's the revelation of Jesus Christ.

It's like the beast, the antichrist, the sign of the beast, all of that to me just doesn't make sense.

But if you lose track of Jesus Christ, you may end up in a destination you didn't intend.

See, when I think of Revelation, it's just fear-mongering. I'm gonna be honest.

But most of these are based on the Old Testament. What we call the Old Testament was John's Bible.

I didn't even know I was reading it eisegetically. How would you prepare us for Revelation? Hi, it's Cass. I wanted to first start off by saying thank you for listening. I created this because I could not find it anywhere else on the internet.

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I'm your host, Cassie Mbellino. And today we're going to talk about revelation and not revelation in the way that we have in the past. This is going to be the most helpful revelation conversation that helps you understand it in a way that actually God wants you to, because what we're going to do is an original Biblically Speaking style where we take scripture and then we understand it with other scripture.

We do at its core exegetical understanding of the word. So if you are scrambling through revelation and none of it makes sense like it did for me before, today we're going to go side by side with the Old Testament scripture that John is referencing in Revelation.

All those things that don't make sense can be explained within the Bible. And the expert that I have with me today is Dr. John Pauline. You are the expert in Revelation. So this is going to be an amazing conversation.

Just a little bit about credibility. The reason that you are the expert is that you're professor of religion and former dean of the School of Religion at Loma Linda University from 2007 till now. Previous to that, you were teaching for 25 years at the Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University.

And you chair the Department of New Testament there. You've also authored a dozen books, dozens of scholarly papers, a bunch of research, numerous media productions. You are a specialist in the study of Joannean literature in the New Testament and everything John.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Pauline.

Thank you, good to be here.

How did you get into this? Why Revelation? That's like easily the hardest book.

Well, I'd have to say I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist and Seventh-day Adventists find their core principles in the Book of Revelation. Now, the Book of Revelation pointed them to some insights that they did not see other churches teaching.

And they seem, you know, Book of Revelation, it sounds like it might be important for the end of time. So they said, well, if other people have not seen this or not teaching it, we ought to maybe take that up ourselves.

And I had an interesting experience about 25 years ago with the Lutheran World Federation where leaders of the Adventist Church and leaders of the Lutheran World Federation got together. And we had some difficulties over Revelation.

Some things that we agreed on, some things we didn't agree on, but a beautiful thing happened at the end. One of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced is the leaders of the Lutheran Church said, we don't really understand entirely what you guys are doing there.

We don't 100 follow it, but God has called you to give a message that others are not seeing. We give you our blessing to do that. And I'm just kind of like, wow, you know, this is the most godly, unselfish thing I'd run into.

So yeah, so there are, not everybody will see Revelation the same way, but I'm coming from a perspective that sees some things maybe that not everyone else has seen. But my mission, as you have pointed out, is to be faithful to the text and faithful to the author of the text, both divine and human, that we read the text in a way that God intended.

Wow, that's what we're here for,.

Because I didn't even know I was reading it eisegetically. If you could, before we get into it, which I know we are going to throughout this episode and the next 60 minutes, would you say that Revelation's about end times, end of the world, destruction, disaster, fear, or in like 10 words or less, like how would you prepare us for Revelation?

How would you see it now?

Well, Revelation's own title is given in the very first verse. And I have it in front of me here in the Greek and the English, but it's the revelation of Jesus Christ. That's the title of the book, the revelation of Jesus Christ.

So in some way, this is revealing Christ in a way that maybe other New Testament books don't. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place. All right, so you have a double theme here.

You have Jesus Christ as the center of the message, but it's a Jesus Christ that's going to be uniquely configured for the end of the world. Jesus, when he was on this earth, often talked about, I will come again.

I'll receive you unto myself. So we look forward to Jesus' return, and the book of Revelation is claiming here to provide insight to prepare people for that end time situation.

See, when I think of Revelation, it's just fear mongering. I'm gonna be honest. It's like the beast, the antichrist, the sign of the beast, the seven years plague, the second coming, the rapture, and we've had dozens of conversations here about end times, but do you have those feelings about Revelation?

Well, you see, there's this double title here. It's about Jesus. It's also about the end time. It's easy to get lost in one or the other. Some people might come to Revelation, just look for Jesus and say, oh, that other stuff.

You know, like some of my Lutheran friends. That's a bunch of gobbledygook. We don't understand it, and I respect that. These were great scholars who were talking to me at the time. One of them was from, I think, Heidelberg University in Germany, very famous university.

So not everybody sees the end time stuff. Some people use the end time stuff to try to create all kinds of excitement and speculation and so forth, and that's never been helpful. There was a man called Leroy Froome who wrote a four-volume set on the history of interpreting the books of Daniel and Revelation, 4 ,000 pages, and basically 99 of all the interpretations predicting future and stuff were wrong over the last 2 ,000 years, yeah.

People who have been confident saying through Revelation, I can predict the next couple years. I can predict everything that happens between now and Jesus coming. That hasn't worked.

Oh, that's good to know.

I do believe Revelation is there to prepare us. I do believe that there is insight we can gain about the end times, but if you lose track of Jesus Christ, you may end up in a destination you didn't intend.

Oh, boy, okay. Well, I feel like I always end up in the wrong destination then. I read Revelation.

Give yourself a little slack. A lot of people, obviously, in 2 ,000 years ended up in the wrong place.

It's like the lamps, it's the pillars, it's the angels, everything. All of that, to me, just doesn't make sense, so you are proposing a very unique

But most of these are based on the Old Testament, and that's the point that you wanted us to make today.

Yes, yes, okay, so with this style, explain to me, how do scholars identify that, okay, Revelation is no longer talking something new, it's now referencing something in the past? Like, ding, ding, ding, there's a signal here.

How do scholars know?

Well, that's the big challenge with Revelation. There's some 270-something quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, but Revelation never, or hardly ever, I think never, quotes the Old Testament.

And by a quote, it would be something like, Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow, you know that one, right? Okay, I'm quoting something verbatim, okay? Revelation doesn't do that.

What's it do?

Revelation hints, alludes, a word here, a phrase there, a nation here, a city there.

Even more complicated.

You know, and scholars, up to about 45 years ago, were basically, they'd recognized this Old Testament stuff there, but didn't entirely know how to handle it. And what I discovered when I was doing my doctoral dissertation, was that there was really no consistent methodology for determining, you know, when is John actually wanting the reader to say, oh, this is something from the Old Testament, and go back there and figure out what that is gonna help us to understand this text.

So, there's actually a couple of others, Gregory Beal, from, I think it's Wheaton College, and Richard Hayes, who was, is he from Yale, I think? Anyway, they were also working on this at the same time that I was working on it.

But, what I did, perhaps more than the others, the specialty is, first of all, distinguish between allusions and echoes, okay? I'm gonna go slow here, all right? Allusions is when the author is thinking that text, okay?

As he's writing the book, he has that text in mind, and wants the reader to see that text and bring it in, okay? And echo is where he uses language familiar from the Old Testament, but he's not sending you there.

He's just using language that you would know from the Old Testament, but it's not an allusion, it's not like a quotation. He's not pointing you back there. That distinction was so important to make, and now I think pretty much everybody who studies Revelation uses that distinction.

Okay, so would an allusion be like a matching word? Would it be a symbol or a structure, syntax, semantics?

Yeah, it's like a quotation, but it doesn't have the certainty that you're dealing with this particular text. So, like with the Mary had a little lamb, anybody hearing that knows exactly where I got that from.

I didn't make it up, okay? Revelation, it's never that certain. It's a little less certain because it's a word here, a phrase there, a name here and there, and so I developed a methodology that has three items to it, and I actually got this from English literature because in English literature, there's been hundreds of years they have studied, they call them influence studies.

What earlier poets, what earlier playwrights, you know, Shakespeare is full of Italian plays, you know, stories from France, stories from England, old traditions and stuff, and when you know where he got it from, it's very, very helpful to understand Shakespeare.

So, English literature has been doing this for hundreds of years.

I see, that's a good parallel.

Robert Jewett was a New Testament scholar at the Calvin College at the time, and he and I talked about this in 1986, and he said, why don't you go to English literature? You know, you've made up this method.

I made it up, you know, basically by studying the text and saying, well, this is helpful to look for, and I went to English literature and found they were doing the same thing I was doing, so that gave me backup from a scholarly perspective.

You don't want to invent something and be the only person, but when other people are doing it in other disciplines, it gives you some context to do it here.

Okay, I'm excited to jump into some of those allusions and the echoes, but just to understand the importance of what we're doing, why is this method even relevant for revelation? Like, is it something we use in other books and we just don't know it?

Well, any Christian writer who quotes the Bible, that's the primary source, and you know it's that person's source, and they're taking you there all the time, they're quoting it, et cetera, et cetera, but those same writers sometimes reflect the Bible without even realizing it.

Verses that they memorized as children, the language pops in and you drop it in there without thinking, oh, that's Psalm 24 -7. No, it's just you know that language, and so allusions are natural things that happen, and we do it all the time, especially with things like TV shows.

Let me see if I can come up with one just off the top of my head. Make my day. That's not a quotation, it's an allusion. You know where that's from, don't you? Or who did it?

I might, I don't know, I can't remember it right now.

Have you heard it? It's Clint Eastwood, and I haven't seen the movie, but make my day is kind of like somebody ironically saying someone's gonna hurt him or something, and he says, oh, make my day, meaning anything you wanna do is not gonna succeed.

Yeah, okay. Okay, it's something familiar that we can kind of draw back to an original. Okay, but what if?

How about, so you're saying there's a chance?

Exactly.

You know that one, right?

Yeah, yeah, I love Dumb and Dumber.

Yeah, so that's an allusion, and we do it all the time. Now, an echo is different, and that's where you don't know where it came from. You know where it came from there, and you could, if I was wanting you to reference that as part of what we're talking about, you would be able to do that, but there's something people often, there's a language that's sort of derogatory.

It says that person is a turkey. Now, it doesn't mean that they're actually a bird. It simply means they're kind of slow, fat, and ugly. It's derogatory, okay? I was there the day that that word came into the English language.

It was a football game in the late 1960s, and there was this particular player who had gained a little weight, and he said, look at that turkey play. You know, he doesn't have it anymore, and this idea of turkey as a derogatory, a word that just says this person's kind of not got it anymore.

Now, everybody kind of recognizes that term, but they don't remember that it was, you know, goes back to a specific event in history, so that's the difference between allusion and echo.

That was really clear.

John echoes Old Testament every line, but doesn't necessarily want the reader to incorporate that into what he's doing. You see, this is kind of a safeguard. It's what you call quality control. You can read a text in Revelation and imagine all kinds of interpretations, but when John is working from his Bible, the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament was John's Bible.

The New Testament did not exist, so he's working from his Bible like any preacher would today, and so John is sometimes quoting it, sometimes just reflecting it unconsciously, and making that distinction was very helpful in interpretation, I found.

Okay, let's get into some of these revelations, so the first one that I want to go into for Revelation and then see what it's alluding to, it's Revelation 1 .1, right at the beginning, and we kind of already touched on it, but what is it alluding to?

And you're saying it's alluding to Daniel, so I'm just gonna read the Revelation, and then I would love for you to explain what that is alluding to, so any, just imagine, you're a Sunday school Christian, you open up Revelation, you've been reading your Bible in a very dedicated way, you finally got to the last book, you read, the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass, and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.

All right, buckle up, this is gonna be a tough read if I'm a Sunday school Christian, so what is he alluding to here? There's more to this? I mean, I think it's like, to me, I just read that as, hey, we're gonna read about a revelation that was given to John about Jesus.

Is there more?

It would be very helpful if we could ask John what he was thinking when he wrote that. Okay, we can't do that, so what we're doing is looking for the evidence, and I look for three types of evidence. One is verbal parallels, when you have a major word in common between Revelation 1 .1 and, let's say, Daniel 2.

Verbal parallels, the more verbal parallels you have, the more likely there's a connection. If you have eight or nine words in order, in common, that would be a quotation, probably. Quotation is simply a certain allusion.

So verbal parallels, thematic parallels, where there's common themes, not necessarily words, common themes, and then structural parallels are where John is quoting that particular Old Testament text over and over and over again.

In a structural parallel, that makes more likely that he is quoting it at this particular point, you see? So you're looking at a text, is John alluding to another text? Well, if he alludes to that text 20 times in the book, that's a structural parallel, it's powerful evidence that he would be alluding to it right here.

Okay, which part of the Revelation 1 .1 is alluding to Daniel 2 .28 and 45?

All right, there's a very strange phrase in here. Looking at it in the English, I think this is the ESV translation. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place.

That what must take place is a very unusual Greek term, adeigenestai, it's kind of awkward, it jumps out and kind of slaps you in the face. Here's the thing, in the entire Old Testament, you'll only find it in Daniel 2.

So right there is a clue. John 1 .1 uses it, Daniel 2 uses it, I think there's one or two places where Jesus uses it.

You mean Revelation 1 .1 uses it and then Daniel 2, okay.

Yeah, yeah, so this what must take place is a very unusual saying that Jesus uses once or twice, otherwise it's Daniel, you see?

Yeah, I'm seeing in the ESV version, Daniel 2 .28 is saying, has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. And then in Daniel 2 .45, it says, a great God has made known to the king what shall be after this.

Okay, the English translations are a little bit over the map, but it's the same Greek words, adeigenestai. Exact same Greek words in all three texts. So in Revelation 1 .1, he says, what must happen soon?

And Daniel 2 .28, he says, what must happen in the last days?

Oh.

And Daniel 2 .45, it's what must happen after these things, you see? So this what must happen is the trigger point that says these three texts are linked, but they're a little bit different each time.

Yeah.

So when John uses what must happen soon, in the back of his mind, it's very helpful to understand, the last days. In Daniel 2, God has showed you, Nebuchadnezzar, what will happen in the last days. And then John says, what must happen soon?

So what do you think he's doing there?

He's saying

It feels like, yeah, somebody's saying in the future, and somebody's saying, it's about to happen.

Yes, yes. So the last days of Daniel are happening in Jesus. And that explains why throughout the New Testament, it talks about Jesus coming as being the last days.

So you're saying, what was future for Daniel is beginning to happen in Revelation.

You got it, you got it.

Then how do we today look back at that written back then, because it seems so past tense, is it still about to happen for us?

That's the tough thing, you see.

Oh, okay.

God has always pictured the end as soon. Throughout the Old Testament, the kingdom of God is coming. The kingdom of God is coming. And they were anticipating all through the prophets, and 800 years goes by and it doesn't happen.

When Jesus comes and says the kingdom of God has arrived, everybody's excited. This is awesome, incredible stuff. And the disciples themselves were kind of expecting to see it in the immediate future.

Yeah.

And you remember that the disciples say, when Jesus is about to ascend to heaven, will you now set up the kingdom of Israel? Disciples on the day when Jesus ascended to heaven, they thought that day might be kingdom day.

And what did they mean by kingdom?

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Now, back to the show.

That they were gonna go to?

Military, no, they meant a military conquest. Israel would conquer the rest of the world. They would subjugate these nasty Gentiles that have been hurting them. You see, that's why Jesus was not understood.

"'My kingdom is not of this world,' he said. "'Therefore, my servants don't fight.'". It's a different kind of kingdom. That's the part that the Israelites of Jesus' day did not understand. They read the Old Testament prophecies and they were looking for all these things to happen.

If you go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness, and they're looking at it as a pretty literal battle in which they'd be outnumbered, but with God's power behind them, they'd drive out the Romans, set up a pure kingdom of God, and the world is gonna be hunky-dory from now on.

But Jesus didn't bring that kind of kingdom. "'His kingdom is within you,' Jesus said.". It's a kingdom in which God is developing the qualities in you that could bring about the end of time, but the actual end with Jesus' second coming is not yet.

Yeah, I mean, that's just like so hard, too.

Yeah, I'm pausing because I want you to feed back and see if we can figure this out together.

Can we?

Is that even possible? I mean, how do we even, like I just wish that Jesus was here to explain himself because I feel like anything I say is just like a guess.

Well, it's not quite that bad. I think you will see. I mean, we've already learned something here, okay, that this Revelation 1 .1 is not just some abstract thing that we don't understand. John is working from his Bible.

In his Bible, it's predicting that the kingdom of God is coming. Jesus comes and says, it's already begun, and I like the way you put it, it's already begun. So the kingdom of God is here, but it's not a kingdom that is visible in the ultimate sense.

And if people think, some people may think that the kingdom is the Christian church. Well, 2 ,000 years of history, that's not been a pretty picture, has it? Between the Crusades and Rwanda and the Inquisition and so on and so forth, God's kingdom through the church is a messy shortfall regarding what the ultimate kingdom will be.

So Jesus is looking that those who are willing to yield their lives to him to become more and more into his image.

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Now back to the show.

And so the way that Jesus behaved on this earth is the model that God would want to show the world through his people. So that's the challenge for us. And the book of Revelation is tying into that, even if it's not as clear at this point as it might be in Jesus' ministry.

Jesus came to transform lives, not to create political hegemony, not to create armies, et cetera. I mean, if you had an army and he could feed 5 ,000 with a few loaves and fishes, and he could heal the wounded soldiers and raise the dead and stuff, nobody could beat you, right?

That's what they were thinking. But that was not the kingdom that Jesus had in mind. It was not the kingdom that the Old Testament was pointing to. Jesus was redirecting their thinking, and John here is redirecting their thinking to a new vision of what God is looking for.

And the reason he's alluding to that is because when it is stated in Daniel, it's a completely different scenario. I mean, what's happening in Daniel at that time that is being written, that's saying it's going to come in the end days.

This is right at the beginning of Daniel. This is right during the exile that he's taken from his home and brought into a paganistic society that he has to then serve. And he kind of defies the guards right away.

Like, are we setting the context right that when John in Revelation is alluding to this verse in Daniel, he's saying, well, those people were going through something very different, looking forward towards Jesus.

Now in Revelation, he is coming.

It's about to happen.

I guess, like, what role does the context of the Daniel play in that?

Yes, for Daniel, Daniel's part of this larger Old Testament context that God raised up a people, children of Abraham, children of Jacob, and the mission of Israel was to bless the Gentiles, bless the nations.

You see, when Adam and Eve sinned, the entire human race came out of relationship with God. The entire human race was messed up. Their characters were twisted. Instead of selflessness, selfishness comes in.

And so it's kind of a mess. And if we had a lot of time, I could show you how the call of Abraham locks in to the creation story and the fall. That Adam and Eve fell and they were consequences for the human race.

The promises to Abraham would undo those negatives. And so he says, through your seed, I will bless the nation. Then to Israel, he says, Exodus 19, you are a kingdom of priests. God called Israel to be a model nation to show the world what God is like and to help bring in the kingdom.

Israel, unfortunately, failed in that. The Old Testament ends with a whimper instead of a bang. But when Jesus comes, he introduces a new possibility. He becomes Israel. He is what the Old Testament was pointing to, this perfect Israel, this model for the world.

Jesus is that. Remember, he chose how many disciples?

Yeah.

Let's move on to the next verse, just because I want to make sure we hit all of these in our time together. The next one is going further into Revelation. Revelation 10 .6. So I'll read the verse, and then I'll show that you're, again, alluding to Daniel is, okay, Revelation 10 .6, and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there will be no more delay.

Okay?

It probably would have been better to start with verse five, because I see it's kind of lapping over the two. But verse five, it says, the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and the land had raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever.

Okay? So that's Revelation 5 .6. There's an angel who raises his right hand, swears an oath, he's standing on the sea, and he says, there'll be no more delay. So he makes a pronouncement regarding time.

And it sounds like, if I'm the Sunday school Christian, I'm reading that saying, okay, so we're just kind of restating God's dominion. We're just kind of emphasizing God's glory, the heaven and the sea and the earth.

Yeah, I got it. God has rule over all of that. So that's what I would have taken away from Revelation. But you're saying, this is alluding to verses in Daniel 12 and Daniel 8. So the verse in Daniel 12 is, and I heard the man clothed, this is verse seven.

And I heard the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream. He raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, it would be for a time, times and a half a time, that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end, all these things would be finished.

And then

There's stuff in there that I struggle to understand. Okay, just want you to know, you have chosen, and I think a lot of people are excited to do this. You have chosen some of the most difficult texts in the Bible.

And we're gonna, through the method that I'm sharing, you can gain more understanding and more certainty than you would otherwise have. Sorry, I interrupted you.

Okay, yeah, no, this is really, really tough. So I'm hoping, what is it in Daniel 12 and 8 here that we should understand kind of that blanketed, he is glory and awesome verse in Revelation. So Daniel 8, 13 and 14 is, then I heard a holy one speaking and another holy one said to him who spoke, for how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate and the giving over of the sanctuary and hosts to be trampled underfoot?

And he said to me, for 2300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state. How the heck are these all connected, Dr. Pauline? I have no idea where to begin.

Okay, let me give you a basic foundation on this one. And there's a man who lived in the early, first half of the 20th century and into like the 50s and 60s. His name was C .H. Dodd, D-O-D-D. And he wrote a book called According to the Scriptures, where he analyzed the 200 plus quotations of the Old Testament in the New and discovered something that nobody had seen before and that everybody looking back says, wow, this is so good and nobody can improve on it.