Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [294]
As solace, the revelation simply and directly confirmed that the crucified messiah is still alive and so all who suffer death for his sake will also be resurrected. He will return and he will show his anger at the persecutors. The promise of resurrection and the defeat of death was a sure exhortation to steadfastness for those who witnessed the suffering and death of martyrs and who might be called upon themselves to suffer and die. The dynamic of the writing is very close to that of Daniel itself, though the Biblical sources contributing to the content of the revelation derived equally from church tradition.
Adela Yarbro Collins sums up the many reasons to adopt a political perspective in understanding this document, while John Collins concentrates on the significance of the fascinating imagery within it.4 The letters to the churches make clear that there is a crisis of persecution in these communities. Although the opponents are sometimes called false Jews (“synagogue of Satan,” Rev 2:9), the visions more often designate Rome as the persecutor and the major target for the coming divine vengeance, perhaps with Jews informing for the Roman overlords.
Even the number of the beast (666) is only the most famous among many indications that Rome was the major persecutor. Since numerological speculation is amazingly versatile and popular in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (in all three languages letters can serve as numbers) and can be put to almost any purpose, any person might fit this puzzling description with a little arithmetic dexterity. But the most likely conjecture is that 666 refered to Nero, whose name can easily be written in Hebrew in such a way as to yield the number 666. If the emperor of the persecution was Domitian (90-96 CE) rather than Nero, the seer was understanding Domitian as the evil emperor Nero redivivus, a persistent popular belief at the time.
However difficult the situation, the faithful will eventually triumph because God is soon to wreak vengeance on the earth. The returning Christ brought fierce retribution to the persecutors, reward and consolation for the victims. Like the book of Daniel and the Jesus movement, the book of Revelation’s basic model is nonviolent resistance for the community enforced with militant rhetoric of the punishments waiting for the enemies of God through the intervention of the Christ.5 The Christ who returns is the agent of punishment. He will, for example, bring fearful conditions of disease, famine, war, and plague (“the four horsemen” of Rev 6), which the persecutors so richly deserved. In Revelation, the Christ appears as both the lamb, the gentle sacrificial animal identified with the martyrs, and the lion, the avenging fury against those who have opposed God’s word.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the martyr visions is found in chapter 6, following the opening of the fifth seal:
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne; they cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been. (Rev 6:9-11)
As in Acts, the afterlife is depicted with naive narrative simplicity; and it is all the more effective because of it. There is an implicit ambiguity in the word “soul.” Though the “soul” terminology may suggest to us the Greek notion of immortal souls, it is more likely that the Hebrew word nefesh alone is understood here as the principle of identity for the martyrs in the intermediary state between their deaths and their resurrection. It seems no different from the word “spirit” used in Acts 7, referring to angels and exalted martyrs in heaven. It is however important that the “soul