The People of God in the Apocalypse: Discourse, Structure and Exegesis (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series)

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T H E P E O P L E O F G O D I N T H E A P O C A LY P S E

Stephen Pattemore examines passages within Rev. 4:1–22:21 that depict the people of God as actors in the apocalyptic drama and infers what impact these passages would have had on the self-understanding and behaviour of the original audience of the work. He uses Relevance Theory, a development in the linguistic field of pragmatics, to help understand the text against the background of allusion to other texts. Three important images are traced. The picture of the souls under the altar (6:9–11) is found to govern much of the direction of the text with its call to faithful witness and willingness for martyrdom. Even the militant image of a messianic army (7:1–8, 14:1–5) urges the audience in precisely the same direction. Both images combine in the final image of the bride, the culmination of challenge and hope traced briefly in the New Jerusalem visions. Dr Pattemore is a translation consultant with United Bible Societies, working with translation projects in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

SOCIETY FOR NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES MONOGRAPH SERIES General Editor: Richard Bauckham

128 T H E P E O P L E O F G O D I N T H E A P O C A LY P S E

S O C I E T Y F O R N E W T E S TA M E N T S T U D I E S MONOGRAPH SERIES Recent titles in the series 117. Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgement and Restoration s t e v e n m . b r ya n 0 521 81183 X 118. The Myth of a Gentile Galilee mark a. chancey 0 521 81487 1 119. New Creation in Paul’s Letters and Thought m o y e r v. h u b b a r d 0 521 81485 5 120. Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles k a r l o l av s a n d n e s 0 521 81535 5 121. The First Christian Historian d a n i e l m a r g u e r at 0 521 81650 5 122. An Aramaic Approach to Q m au r i c e c a s e y 0 521 81723 4 123. Isaiah’s Christ in Matthew’s Gospel r i c h a r d b e at o n 0 521 81888 5 124. God and History in the Book of Revelation michael gilbertson 0 521 82466 4 125. Jesus’ Defeat of Death p e t e r g . b o lt 0 521 83036 2 126. From Hope to Despair in Thessalonica colin r. nicholl 0 521 83142 3 127. Trilogy of Parables wesley g. olmstead 0 521 83154 7 128. The People of God in the Apocalypse s t e p h e n pat t e m o r e 0 521 83698 0

The People of God in the Apocalypse Discourse, Structure, and Exegesis

S T E P H E N PAT T E M O R E

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521836982 © Stephen Pattemore 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13 isbn-10

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CONTENTS

List of figures and table Preface List of abbreviations 1 A question of relevance

page viii ix xi 1

2 Relevance Theory in biblical interpretation

13

3 A cognitive environment for the Apocalypse

51

4 Souls under the altar – a martyr ecclesiology

68

5 Companions of the Lamb – a messianic ecclesiology

117

6 The New Jerusalem, bride of the Lamb

197

7 Summary and conclusions

213

Appendix Bibliography Index

Abbreviated discourse outline

220 226 246

vii

F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E

Figure 5.1 Dialectic of naming/sealing/marking in Revelation Figure 5.2 Dialectic of sexual imagery in Revelation Table 5.1 Narrative structure of Daniel 7 and Revelation

viii

page 183 188 120

P R E FAC E

The book of Revelation, despite (or perhaps because of) the perplexing nature of its imagery, continues to attract both academic and popular interest in Western societies in the early years of a new millennium. But the stimulus for this study has come from involvement in the task of translating the scriptures into the languages of Asia and the Pacific. The context of Bible translation has given a pragmatic edge to my study. While I have focussed principally on understanding the text within its original context, the goal and purpose has always been not only to add to academic literature on the book of Revelation, but to provide a secure basis for contextualizing its message in the vastly different languages and thought worlds of contemporary societies. This work has its origins in the major part of my Otago University doctoral thesis, and my thanks go to Paul Trebilco, Tim Meadowcroft, and Peter Carrell for their skilful supervision and advice and also for their friendship and encouragement. Otago University (Dunedin), the Bible College of New Zealand (Auckland), and Tyndale House (Cambridge, UK) have all played a significant part in bringing this research to fruition. The research was carried out with the help of a scholarship provided by the United Bible Societies, to whom my sincere thanks are due for their generous sponsorship. In particular I wish to acknowledge the help and encouragement of David Clark, for many years UBS Translation Consultant to the Urak Lawoi’ New Testament translation project on which I worked. Thanks also to Graham Ogden, and to his successor as Asia-Pacific Regional Translations Coordinator, Daud Soesilo, and to Basil Rebera, formerly UBS Translation Services Coordinator, for their support. Part of my research, a discourse analysis of the entire book of Revelation, which sets the stage for this present work, has recently been published in the UBS Monograph Series. Thanks for financial help are also due to the John Baldwin Memorial Scholarship Fund. My thanks are due to John Court, and his predecessor as editor of the SNTS Monograph Series, Richard Bauckham, for their advice ix

x

Preface

and encouragement. I am also very grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Press, in particular Kate Brett and Jackie Warren, and to Pauline Marsh, for their help in bringing the typescript to publication. My own family has been a loving and stimulating context in which to carry out this study, keeping me firmly anchored to the reality of contemporary life. This volume is dedicated to my wife, Raewyn, who, having endured an earlier thesis (in Physics, twenty-five years ago), not only accepted another thesis into the family with good grace, but provided all the personal encouragement and support I have needed. And it has been an ever-present challenge to justify to teenage and young adult children why “slaughtered souls under the altar” deserved so much time and attention. Thank you to Kerryn and Greg, to David, Rachel, and Brian, fellow pilgrims to the New Jerusalem.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Periodicals, series and reference works AB ACNT AnBib AramBib AUSS AUSDDS BAGD

BAR BBS BETL BGBE BI Bib BJRL BR BSac BT BTB BTTB3 BZNW CBQ CBQMS CNT ConBNT

Anchor Bible Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament Analectica Biblica The Aramaic Bible: The Targums Andrews University Seminary Studies Andrews University Seminary Doctoral Dissertation Series W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, F. W. Gingrich, and F. W. Danker, A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1958) Biblical Archaeology Review Behavioural and Brain Sciences Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese Biblical Interpretation Biblica Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester Biblical Research Bibliotheca Sacra The Bible Translator Biblical Theology Bulletin Bibliothèque de théologie. Théologie biblique, series 3 Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly CBQ Monograph Series Commentaire du Nouveau Testament Coniectanea Biblica New Testament Series xi

xii

List of abbreviations

CRINT CT DSD EQ EstB ETL EUS23 ExpTim FRLANT GNS GNTE GTJ HAR HBT HDR HNT HTR ICC Int IVPNTC JBL JECS JETS JNSL JPrag JR JSJ JSJSup JSNT JSNTSup JSOTSup JSPSup JTS KKNT Lang LL NA

Compendia Rerum Iudicarum ad Novum Testamentum Cahiers théologiques Dead Sea Discoveries Evangelical Quarterly Estudios B´ıblicos Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses European University Studies, Series 23, Theology Expository Times Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Good News Studies Guides to New Testament Exegesis Grace Theological Journal Hebrew Annual Review Horizons in Biblical Theology Harvard Dissertations in Religion Handbuch zum Neuen Testament Harvard Theological Review International Critical Commentary Interpretation Intervarsity Press New Testament Commentary Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages Journal of Pragmatics Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the New Testament JSNT Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar u¨ ber das Neue Testament Language Language and Literature Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen

List of abbreviations NA27

NCB Neot NICNT NICOT NIGTC NovT NovTSup NRT NTC NTL NTM NTS OTM PBNS RB RevQ RivB SacP SBT SBT2 SM SNT SNTSMS ST STDJ TDNT

TDOT

TrinJ TU TUGAL TynB TZ

xiii

B. Aland, K. Aland, J. Karavidopoulos, C. M. Martini, and B. M. Metzger (eds.), Novum Testamentum Graece (Nestle–Aland) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 27th edn, 1993) New Century Bible Neotestamentica New International Commentary on the New Testament New International Commentary on the Old Testament New International Greek Testament Commentary Novum Testamentum Novum Testamentum, Supplements La Nouvelle Revue théologique The New Testament in Context New Testament Library New Testament Message New Testament Studies Oxford Theological Monographs Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series Revue biblique Revue de Qumran Rivista biblica Sacra Pagina Studies in Biblical Theology Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series Studia Missionalia Studien zum Neuen Testament Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series Studia Theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah G. Kittel and G. Friedrich (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. G. W. Bromiley (10 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964– ) G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (10 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974–98), vol. IX, trans. D. E. Green Trinity Journal of Theology Texte und Untersuchungen Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur Tyndale Bulletin Theologische Zeitschrift

xiv

List of abbreviations

UBS4

UCLWPL UCOP VC VoxEv VT WBC WMANT WTJ WUNT ZNW

B. Aland, K. Aland, J. Karavidopoulos, C. M. Martini, and B. M. Metzger (eds.), The Greek New Testament (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft/ United Bible Societies, 4th edn, 1993) University College London Working Papers in Linguistics University of Cambridge Oriental Publications Vigiliae Christianae Vox Evangelica Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum alten und neuen Testament Westminster Theological Journal Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschafte

Books of the Bible and Apocrypha Gen. Exod. Lev. Num. Deut. Josh. Judg. Ruth 1 Sam. 2 Sam. 1 Esdr. 4 Ezra (= 2 Esdr. 3–14) Wisd. Matt. Mark Luke John Acts Rom. 1 Cor.

1 Kings Eccl. 2 Kings Song 1 Chron. Isa. 2 Chron. Jer. Ezra Lam. Neh. Ezek. Esth. Dan. Job Hos. Ps. (pl. Pss.) Joel Prov. Amos Sir. Bar. 1 Macc. 2 Cor. 1 Tim. Gal. 2 Tim. Eph. Tit. Phil. Phlm. Col. Heb. 1 Thess. Jas. 2 Thess. 1 Pet.

Obad. Jon. Mic. Nah. Hab. Zeph. Hag. Zech. Mal. 2 Macc.

2 Pet. 1 Jn 2 Jn 3 Jn Jude Rev.

List of abbreviations Ancient Jewish and Christian literature and texts Adv. Marc. Ap. Bar. Asc. Isa. 2 Bar. = Bar. Syr. BW 1 Enoch Jos. As. JW LXX MT Odes Sol. OG 1QM Pss. Sol. Targ. Targ. Jer. Frag. Targ. Ps.-J. Test. Jos. Test. Lev. Test. Sim. Th. Tos. Targ.

Tertullian, Against Marcion 3 Baruch, Apocalypse of Baruch (Greek) The Ascension of Isaiah 2 Baruch, Apocalypse of Baruch (Syriac) The Book of the Watchers, 1 Enoch 1–36 Ethiopic Enoch Joseph and Asenath Josephus, The Jewish War Septuagint (ed. A. Rahlfs) Masoretic Text Odes of Solomon Old Greek version of Daniel The War Scroll, from Qumran Cave 1 Psalms of Solomon Targum Targum of Jerusalem (fragmentary) Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Testament of Joseph Testament of Levi Testament of Simeon Theodotion version of Daniel Tosephta Targum

xv

1 A Q U E S T I O N O F R E L E VA N C E

1.1

The relevance of the Apocalypse

The Apocalypse of St John has always provoked the question of its own relevance. In the second century its place in the canon was far from assured, with questions raised about its apparent Jewish character, its symbolism, and its apostolic authorship.1 By the 1990s it could still be described as ‘only marginally canonical’.2 In between it has both influenced art, literature, and politics and yet suffered from neglect and abuse.3 The Apocalypse has been the handbook for millenarian sects of many shades throughout the past two millennia, with increasing frequency and intensity in the periods leading up to the years 1000 and 2000.4 But it has also been used by those with power, to bolster their position by 1 On the early reception of the Apocalypse see R. H. Charles, The Revelation of St. John (2 vols., ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), vol. I, pp. xcvii–ciii; H. B. Swete, The Apocalypse of John (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp. cvi–cxix; N. B. Stonehouse, The Apocalypse in the Ancient Church: A Study in the History of the New Testament Canon (Goes, the Netherlands: Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, 1929), especially pp. 150–5. On authorship see Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. xxxviii–l, and further below, Chapter 3, pp. 52–3. 2 T. Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John (Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation; Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 1992), p. 46. 3 See summaries in M. E. Boring, Revelation (Interpretation; Louisville: John Knox Press, 1989), p. 61; J. Roloff, The Revelation of John, trans. John E. Alsup (A Continental Commentary; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 1–3; and, in more detail, in R. K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (eds.), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Thought, Art and Culture; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). On the abuse of Revelation through history see K. G. C. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On the influence of the Apocalypse on art see F. Carey (ed.), The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum, 1999). 4 See especially N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). The influence of the Apocalypse on the Branch Dravidian cult of Waco, Texas has been discussed by J. M. Court, ‘A Future for Eschatology?’, in M. D. Carroll, D. J. A. Clines, and P. R. Davies (eds.), The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson (JSOTSup, 200; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 191–3; and especially Newport, Apocalypse, pp. 197–236.

1

2

The People of God in the Apocalypse

marginalizing or demonizing others.5 Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millenarianism of one kind or another, usually formed by an eclectic and harmonizing approach to the books of Revelation and Daniel, has been an important focus, and sometimes a touchstone of orthodoxy, for evangelical Christianity.6 Millennial anxiety prior to the year 2000, compounded by apocalyptic scenarios proposed for the Y2K computer bug, led to an increase in interest in the Apocalypse and in apocalyptic language and imagery, not only in evangelical circles but in the popular press and media.7 Perhaps because of these phenomena, but also simply because of the difficulty of the language and symbolism of the book, and its apparent lack of connection with the modern world, the Apocalypse has, until comparatively recently, suffered considerable neglect in reformed, mainstream, and liberal Christianity.8 But in scholarly circles the second half of the twentieth century saw a remarkable recovery of interest in apocalyptic literature in general, partly as a result of mid-century wars and the possibilities of nuclear holocaust.9 The book from which the genre takes its name has ridden the wave of interest, with considerable progress made in understanding it in the context of its own socio-historical world. But despite, or provoked by, this revival of interest there has also been a stream of thought, drawing on reader-centred, deconstructionist methodologies, strongly antagonistic to the Apocalypse and the world-views it allegedly promotes. Ethical problems such as anti-semitism, misogyny, militarism, and patriarchal colonialism have been attributed to it, leading one recent writer to hold that ‘Revelation is unreclaimable.’10 5 See Newport, Apocalypse, pp. 48–65; S. L. Cook, Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Post-Exilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 55–84. 6 See E. R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); H. Dunton, ‘Millennial Hopes and Fears: Great Britain, 1780–1960’, AUSS 37 (1999), pp. 179–208. 7 J. Paulien, ‘The Millennium is Here Again: Is it Panic Time?’, AUSS 37 (1999), pp. 167–78, avoids the hysteria but retains focus on the hope of Christ’s return. 8 See Roloff, Revelation, pp. 1–3. For strong reactions to conservative evangelical viewpoints see A. Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 13–14; E. Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Proclamation Commentaries; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 7–10. 9 See the introductory remarks by Hanson in P. D. Hanson (ed.), Visionaries and their Apocalypses (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 8. 10 A. M. Jack, Texts Reading Texts, Sacred and Secular (JSNTSup, 179; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), p. 208. See also T. Pippin, ‘Eros and the End: Reading for Gender in the Apocalypse of John’, Semeia 59 (1992), pp. 193–210; S. D. Moore, ‘The Beatific Vision as a Posing Exhibition: Revelation’s Hypermasculine Deity’, JSNT 60 (1995), pp. 27–55; Pippin, Death and Desire; Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation, pp. 117–39. A more measured approach to the book’s ethical problems is D. L. Barr, ‘Towards an Ethical

A question of relevance

3

Questions of relevance have also been my own entry point into the study of John’s Apocalypse, through involvement in the translation of the New Testament into indigenous language of the Asia-Pacific region. Although the language of Revelation presents surprisingly few translation problems, few communities possess the background knowledge needed to understand the bizarre imagery. How responsible is it to give such a book to people who can know so little of its origins, who are so remote from its world of ideas? Yet the translator of the NT works under canonical constraints, and this shifts the domain of questions of relevance back from the contemporary community to the community involved with the original communication event. For the Apocalypse’s canonical status is evidence of its relevance to that original community.11 How did it achieve that relevance? How did the original audience find themselves in the text? How did they relate to ‘the souls of those who had been slaughtered’ or the 144,000 male virgin followers of the Lamb? In what directions did the Apocalypse’s text move them? Answering such questions should provide a basis from which to address questions of relevance to the contemporary community. The concept of ‘relevance’ has thus far remained undefined and yet central to the discussion. What does it mean to be ‘relevant’? Can relevance be measured so as to discriminate between things which are more or less relevant? Relevant to whom? Relevance Theory, a development in the linguistic field of pragmatics, offers a promising way forward.12 By defining ‘relevance’ precisely and locating its effect in the cognitive processes of the human mind it provides a framework both for an explanation of the process of understanding utterances and for measuring, at least comparatively, the relevance of a particular concept in a particular context. It is the burden of the central part of this study to investigate, using Relevance Theory, how the Apocalypse captured its audience, how it led them to identify with characters in the drama being portrayed, and in what directions it motivated them. 1.2

The people of the Apocalypse

Locating our interest in the relevance of the Apocalypse to its original audience raises questions about the community that gave rise to the book, Reading of the Apocalypse: Reflections on John’s Use of Power, Violence and Misogyny’, in SBL Seminar Papers 1997 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 358–73. 11 D. L. Barr, ‘The Apocalypse as a Symbolic Transformation of the World: A Literary Analysis’, Int 38 (1984), p. 39. 12 The seminal work is D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1st edn, 1986, 2nd edn, 1995). See p. 13 n. 2 below for a brief discussion of pragmatics.

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both in its geographical, social, and political context and in its world of ideas. Both areas have received considerable attention. On the assumption that the intended recipients of the book were the churches of Asia Minor mentioned in chs. 1–3, Hemer has provided a detailed description, updating the earlier work of Ramsay.13 Others have described in more general terms the location of early Christian communities in the Greco-Roman and Jewish Diaspora contexts of the first century.14 For the major part of the book, it is the thought-world of Jewish and Christian traditions and literature that must provide the most important clues to relevance. The relationship of Revelation to the Old Testament has been an area of intensive research, and numerous approaches to understanding this relationship have been advanced.15 The influence of the OT background will play a major role in this study, but consideration must 13 W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia and their Place in the Plan of the Apocalypse (Reprint of 1904 edn; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979); C. J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in their Local Setting (JSNTSup, 11; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986). The view that the local references have little significance and that John is opposing a single Gnostic sect is championed by P. Prigent, ‘L’Hérésie asiatique et l’Eglise confessante’, VC 31 (1977), pp. 1–22; P. Prigent, L’Apocalypse de Saint Jean (CNT, 14; Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2nd corrected edn, 1988), pp. 25–6, 37–9, 80. See also C. H. H. Scobie, ‘Local References in the Letters to the Seven Churches’, NTS 39 (1993), pp. 606–24; J. M. Court, Myth and History in the Book of Revelation (London: SPCK, 1979), pp. 20–42; J. R. Michaels, Interpreting the Book of Revelation (GNTE, 7; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1992), pp. 35–42; S. J. Friesen, ‘Revelation, Realia, and Religion: Archaeology in the Interpretation of the Apocalypse’, HTR 88 (1995), pp. 291–314. My assumptions will be made explicit below, pp. 51–60. 14 S. E. Johnson, ‘Asia Minor and Early Christianity’, in J. Neusner (ed.), Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults. Part Two: Early Christianity (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity; Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 77–145; D. Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988); L. L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); P. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor (SNTSMS, 69; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); L. L. Thompson, ‘Mooring the Revelation in the Mediterranean’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1992 (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1992), pp. 635–53; P. Borgen, Early Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996); R. Garrison, The Graeco-Roman Context of Early Christian Literature (JSNTSup, 137; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). 15 On the location of Revelation in the first-century literary environment see D. E. Aune, The New Testament in its Literary Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), pp. 226–52. On the relationship with the OT see G. K. Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament in Revelation (JSNTSup, 166; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); J. Cambier, ‘Les Images de l’Ancien Testament dans l’Apocalypse de saint Jean’, NRT 77 (1955), pp. 113–22; A. Vanhoye, ‘L’Utilisation du livre d’Ezéchiel dans l’Apocalypse’, Bib 43 (1962), pp. 436–76; A. Lancellotti, ‘L’Antico Testamento nell’ Apocalisse’, RivB 14 (1966), pp. 369–84; G. K. Beale, ‘Revelation’, in D. A. Carson and H. G. M. Williamson (eds.), It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture. Essays in Honour of Barnabas Lindars, SSF (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 318–36; J. Paulien, Decoding Revelation’s Trumpets: Literary Allusions and the Interpretation of Revelation 8:7–12 (AUSDDS, 11; Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1988); J.-P. Ruiz, Ezekiel in the


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also be given to the influence of later Palestinian Judaism and the traditions stemming from (or reflected by) Qumran.16 Despite its heavy reliance on Jewish traditions, the Apocalypse as it stands is unmistakably a Christian document, and the connections it displays to the traditions, both textual and liturgical, of early Christianity have understandably attracted significant attention.17 Another world-view which contributes to the relevance of the Apocalypse in its original context is that of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. Revived interest in apocalyptic literature and the communities that produced it has had a vast and growing literary output.18 A significant Apocalypse: The Transformation of Prophetic Language in Revelation 16, 17–19, 10 (EUS23, 376; Frankfurt-on-Main: Peter Lang, 1989); J. Fekkes, Isaiah and Prophetic Traditions in the Book of Revelation: Visionary Antecedents and their Development (JSNTSup, 93; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); S. Moyise, The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation (JSNTSup, 115; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). 16 For the background in Palestinian Judaism see M. McNamara, The New Testament and the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch (AnBib, 27; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1966); M. McNamara, Palestinian Judaism and the New Testament (GNS; Dublin: Veritas, 1983); P. Trudinger, ‘The Apocalypse and the Palestinian Targum’, BTB 16 (1986), pp. 78–9. For Qumran see H. Braun, Qumran und das Neue Testament, vol. I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1966); F. Garc´ıa Mart´ınez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Text from Qumran (STDJ, 9; Leiden: Brill, 1992); M. Chyutin, The New Jerusalem Scroll from Qumran: A Comprehensive Reconstruction (JSPSup, 25; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); D. E. Aune, ‘Qumran and the Book of Revelation’, in P. W. Flint and J. C. Vanderkam (eds.), The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, vol. II (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 622–50. 17 L. A. Vos, The Synoptic Traditions in the Apocalypse (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1965); R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament (OTM; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); A. A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (SNTSMS, 31; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); G. K. Beale, ‘The Use of Daniel in the Synoptic Eschatological Discourse and in the Book of Revelation’, in D. Wenham (ed.), The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels (Gospel Perspectives, 5; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), pp. 129–53; A.-M. Enroth, ‘The Hearing Formula in the Book of Revelation’, NTS 36 (1990), pp. 598–608; M. E. Boring, The Continuing Voice of Jesus: Christian Prophecy and the Gospel Tradition (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991); R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies in the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993), pp. 92–117; S. S. Smalley, Thunder and Love: John’s Revelation and John’s Community (Milton Keynes: Word, 1994). Studies which trace the dependence of, for example, Revelation 4–5 on early Christian liturgy include L. Mowry, ‘Revelation 4–5 and Early Christian Liturgical Usage’, JBL 71 (1952), pp. 75–84; P. Prigent, Apocalypse et liturgie (CT, 52; Neuchatel: Editions Delachaux et Niestlé, 1964); J.-P. Ruiz, ‘Revelation 4:8–11; 5:9–14: Hymns of the Heavenly Liturgy’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1995 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), pp. 216–20. On supposed liturgical usage of the text of Revelation see U. Vanni, ‘Un esempio di dialogo liturgico in Ap 1, 4–8’, Bib 57 (1976), pp. 453–67; U. Vanni, ‘Liturgical Dialogue as a Literary Form in the Book of Revelation’, NTS 37 (1991), pp. 348–72; J.-P. Ruiz, ‘Betwixt and Between on the Lord’s Day: Liturgy and the Apocalypse’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1992 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 654–72. 18 See J. H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. I, Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (New York: Doubleday, 1983); J. J. Collins and J. H. Charlesworth

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outcome of this research for the present study has been the extension of the definition of apocalyptic literature from a primarily formal one, to include a statement about its function.19 The close relationship which has emerged between form and function is illustrated by Aune’s definition of the function of an apocalypse: Function: (a) to legitimate the transcendent authorization of the message, (b) by mediating a new actualization of the original revelatory experience through literary devices, structures and imagery, which function to ‘conceal’ the message which the text ‘reveals’, so that (c) the recipients of the message will be encouraged to modify their cognitive and behavioral stance in conformity with transcendent perspectives.20 The applicability of this description to the book of Revelation may be thought to hinge on the precise relationship of the book to the genre (eds.), Mysteries and Revelations: Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium (JSPSup, 9; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991); J. J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2nd edn, 1998); Cook, Prophecy and Apocalypticism; Hanson (ed.), Visionaries and their Apocalypses; H. H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation (London: Lutterworth Press, revised edn, 1963); D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (London: SCM Press, 1964); P. Vielhauer, ‘Apocalyptic’, in E. Henneke (ed.), New Testament Apocrypha (London: Lutterworth Press, 1965), pp. 587–94; K. Koch, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (SBT2, 22; London: SCM Press, 1972); P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); D. Hellholm (ed.), Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2nd edn, 1979); J. Lambrecht (ed.), L’Apocalypse johannique et l’Apocalyptique dans le Nouveau Testament (BETL, 53; Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1980), J. C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS, 16; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association, 1984); H. S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (WMANT, 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988); P. Sacchi, Jewish Apocalyptic and its History (JSPSup, 20; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990); D. S. Russell, Prophecy and the Apocalyptic Dream: Protest and Promise (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994); J. C. VanderKam and W. Adler (eds.), The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity (CRINT, 4; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996). 19 See the two issues of Semeia which focus on apocalyptic, J. J. Collins (ed.), Apocalypse: Morphology of a Genre (Semeia, 14; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), and A. Yarbro Collins (ed.), Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting (Semeia, 36; Decatur, GA: Scholars Press, 1986). The earlier formal definition is found in J. J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre’, Semeia 14 (1979), p. 9. 20 D. E. Aune, ‘The Apocalypse of John and the Problem of Genre’, Semeia 36 (1986), p. 87. See also D. Hellholm, ‘The Problem of Apocalyptic Genre and the Apocalypse of John’, Semeia 36 (1986), pp. 13–64, and the evaluation by A. Yarbro Collins, ‘Introduction: Early Christian Apocalypticism’, Semeia 36 (1986), pp. 1–12.


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‘Apocalypse’.21 But this is to assume an understanding of genre which is too deterministic, especially for a book which appears to claim membership of three genres – apocalypse, prophecy, and letter.22 More helpful is Schüssler Fiorenza’s pragmatic approach, speaking of the ‘generic tenor’ of the book in a way that allows exploration of the contribution of elements of each generic type to the function of the book.23 A number of studies, reflecting this functional approach to apocalyptic genre but drawing also on social-scientific methodology and on the study of ancient rhetorical strategies, have attempted to explain how the Apocalypse might have transformed the world-view and thus altered the behaviour patterns of its audience.24 21 On the genre of Revelation see D. E. Aune, Revelation 1–5 (WBC, 52a; Dallas: Word, 1997), pp. lxx–xc; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 37–43; R. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–17; B. J. Malina, On the Genre and Message of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995); F. D. Mazzaferri, The Genre of the Book of Revelation from a Source-critical Perspective (BZNW, 54; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989); Thompson, Apocalypse and Empire, pp. 18–24. Studies on apocalyptic genre with relationship to the Apocalypse include L. Hartman, ‘Form and Message: A Preliminary Discussion of “Partial Texts” in Rev 1–3 and 22, 6ff.’, in Lambrecht, L’Apocalypse johannique, pp. 129–49; W. W. Vorster, ‘ “Genre” and the Revelation of John: A Study in Text, Context and Intertext’, Neot 22 (1988), pp. 103–23; J. J. Collins, ‘The Genre Apocalypse in Hellenistic Judaism’, in Hellholm, Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World, pp. 531–48; E. Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘The Phenomenon of Early Christian Apocalyptic: Some Reflections on Method’, in Hellholm, Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World, pp. 295–316; R. E. Sturm, ‘Defining the Word “Apocalyptic”: A Problem in Biblical Criticism’, in J. Marcus and M. L. Soards (eds.), Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honour of J. Louis Martyn (JSNTSup, 24; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), pp. 17–48; D. E. Aune, ‘Intertextuality and the Genre of the Apocalypse’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1991 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 142–60; G. Linton, ‘Reading the Apocalypse as an Apocalypse’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1991 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 161–86; J. J. Collins, ‘The Christian Appropriation of the Apocalyptic Tradition’, in Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (JSJSup, 54; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 115–27. 22 See Rev. 1:1–8. See Michaels, Interpreting, pp. 21–33; Beale, Revelation, pp. 37–43. On the letter form of the Apocalypse see M. Karrer, Die Johannesoffenbarung als Brief (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986). 23 Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, Revelation, pp. 23–6. 24 See Barr, ‘Symbolic Transformation’; D. L. Barr, ‘The Apocalypse of John as Oral Enactment’, Int 40 (1986), pp. 243–56. Social-science approaches undergird Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis; Thompson, Apocalypse and Empire; J. N. Kraybill, Imperial Cult and Commerce in John’s Apocalypse (JSNTSup, 132; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); T. B. Slater, Christ and Community: A Socio-Historical Study of the Christology of Revelation (JSNTSup, 178; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Rhetorical strategy plays an important part in the approach of Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation; J. T. Kirby, ‘The Rhetorical Situations of Revelation 1–3’, NTS 34 (1988), pp. 197–207; D. E. Aune, ‘The Form and Function of the Proclamations to the Seven Churches (Revelation 2–3)’, NTS 36 (1990), pp. 182–204; R. M. Royalty Jr, ‘The Rhetoric of Revelation’, in SBL Seminar Papers 1997 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 596–617; D. A. deSilva, ‘Honor Discourse and the Rhetorical Strategy of the Apocalypse of John’, JSNT 71 (1998), pp. 79–110.

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Yet for all this interest in the function of the Apocalypse, there is surprisingly little written about the way in which the vision narratives, particularly those that depict the people of God in some form or other, interact with the audience’s self-understanding to motivate them towards belief and behaviour. In fact the visionary depictions of the people of God themselves have received relatively little attention.25 Several important studies must be noted, however, and their influence acknowledged. First, Minear suggested that ‘John expressed a distinct hortatory intention in at least eight different literary forms.’26 While explicit imperatives occur mainly in the messages of chs. 2–3, the later visions contribute significantly to several of the other forms.27 This study will have occasion to explore how some of these work in greater detail. Trites’ The New Testament Concept of Witness included a helpful chapter on ‘witness’ in the book of Revelation.28 Trites emphasizes the forensic aspect of witness, and the importance of this to the audience’s potential conflict with state or civic law, but also presents a perceptive study on the two witnesses in Revelation 11, and their importance to the audience’s understanding of their responsibilities.29 Sweet also focusses on the idea of witness, but emphasizes its inevitable outcome in suffering for the witnesses, and the identification that this entails between them and their Lord. Further, he interprets the victory of God’s people as a victory through suffering and sacrifice.30 Schüssler Fiorenza and Aune have both published studies which take as their starting point the 144,000 followers of the Lamb in Rev. 14:1–5.31 But while Schüssler Fiorenza uses this as a springboard 25 J. L. Resseguie, Revelation Unsealed: A Narrative Critical Approach to John’s Apocalypse (Biblical Interpretation Series, 32; Leiden: Brill, 1998) does not even list them among the main characters. John uses many terms to refer to God’s people – slaves of God, saints, witnesses, churches, prophets, and other descriptive phrases. Although with a possessive pronoun referring to God occurs only twice (18:4; 21:3), I shall use the phrase ‘people of God’ throughout this study as a conveniently inclusive expression. 26 P. S. Minear, I Saw a New Earth: An Introduction to the Visions of the Apocalypse (Washington: Corpus Books, 1968), p. 214. 27 Minear’s list, in brief, consists of phrases, beatitudes, conditional clauses, hortatory subjunctives, ‘he who conquers’ phrases, vice and virtue, lists and explicit imperatives (ibid., pp. 214–223). 28 Trites, Witness, pp. 154–74. 29 See pp. 160–4 below. 30 J. P. M. Sweet, ‘Maintaining the Testimony of Jesus: The Suffering of Christians in the Revelation of John’, in W. Horbury and B. McNeil (eds.), Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament: Studies Presented to G. M. Styler by the Cambridge New Testament Seminar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–17. The results of this seminal study will be seen to be largely borne out by my thematic investigations below. 31 E. Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, ‘The Followers of the Lamb: Visionary Rhetoric and SocioPolitical Situation’, Semeia 36 (1986), pp. 123–46; D. E. Aune, ‘Following the Lamb: Discipleship in the Apocalypse’, in R. N. Longenecker (ed.), Patterns of Discipleship in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 269–84.


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for discussion of John’s rhetorical strategy, Aune focusses on the nature of the discipleship to which John is urging his audience, with emphasis on following Jesus through suffering, and discipleship as an expression of sacrifice. A significant influence on Aune’s approach is Bauckham’s treatment of the 144,000 as a messianic army.32 Bauckham’s work not only identifies an extended military metaphor in the visions, but links these visions to the theme of messianic fulfilment and highlights the fact that the only warfare which this army engages in is ‘ironic warfare’ through its experience of suffering, and its victory is a victory through death. The links between the Messiah and his people are further developed in a recent christological study, Slater’s Christ and Community. Slater examines three primary christological images, the son of man, the Lamb, and the Divine Warrior, and concludes each section with a discussion of the meaning of these images for the community to which the book is addressed. This study is important for what it affirms about the significance of the christology of Revelation for the people of God, and in particular the relationship of the presentation of Christ as son of man with the messages to the seven churches. But apart from this, and precisely because his is a study of christology, he does not deal directly with the ecclesiology of the book or with the images of the people of God in the visionary accounts.33 1.3

Aims and scope of this study

Adela Yarbro Collins concluded a survey of twentieth-century interpretations of the Apocalypse with these words: ‘Revelation . . . provides a story in and through which the people of God discover who they are and what they are to do.’34 My study aims to elucidate this process of discovery on both fronts, identity and action. The Apocalypse, however, is not one story but a nesting of embedded stories. Kirby distinguishes three rhetorical situations involved in the book, namely the communication situations between John and his readers, 32 33

Bauckham, Climax, pp. 210–37. See Slater, Christ and Community, pp. 116–53. Apart from Slater, the most significant links between christology and ecclesiology have been made by Bauckham in the studies discussed here and in his Theology, pp. 66–108. A recent addition to works discussing the depiction of the people of God is G. Stevenson, Power and Place: Temple and Identity in the Book of Revelation (BZNW, 107; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), who also provides detailed background to the significance of temple imagery in Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. 34 A. Yarbro Collins, ‘Reading the Book of Revelation in the Twentieth Century’, Int 40 (1986), p. 242.

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between Jesus and John, and between Jesus and the churches.35 But this still does not adequately cover the difference in rhetorical situation between, say, chs. 1–3 and chs. 4–22. Barr moves the discussion further by distinguishing ‘three basic narrative levels, each with its own narrator and narratee’.36 On the outer level, the reader of the Apocalypse is the narrator and his audience the narratee, whom Barr links most closely with the implied audience. On the second level, John narrates his visions to a narratee ‘named as the seven churches’.37 On the innermost level, characters within John’s narrative themselves narrate to other characters. Although technically distinct, from a pragmatic perspective Barr’s narratees on the first and second levels are hard to separate from each other or from the implied audience, since they share the same social location. We shall assume in this study that they represent real Christians in real first-century churches in Asia Minor. Characters on the innermost level, narrators and narratees, are elements of a vision, and it will be part of our task to identify which of these are representing the people of God. Within this framework, we shall seek to answer the following questions. How do the narratees on Barr’s first and second levels relate to the characters which depict the people of God on the innermost level, whether narrators or narratees? Do the stories in which these characters participate reflect the actual situation of the audience, or some hypothetical situation, whether idealized or future? How does the depiction of the people of God in the visions contribute to the self-understanding of the audience? And finally, in what directions does it move them? What are the cognitive and behavioural outcomes to which the narrative seeks to lead them? The issue, then, is not the relationship of the first and second level narratees to a real audience, about which we have virtually no independent knowledge. Rather, assuming that these narratees correspond in general (and perhaps specific) social location to the real audience, how do the vision narratives, in particular those described in Rev. 4:1–22:9, aid their discovery of ‘who they are and what they are to do’? The methodology distinctive of this study will be the use of Relevance Theory (RT) to investigate these questions. To my knowledge, among writers on the Apocalypse, only Garrow shows the influence of Sperber and Wilson’s cognitive approach.38 The intention is not to put forward RT as a stand-alone alternative to existing hermeneutical strategies, but to use insights from it to sharpen the interpretive focus. The extensive 35

Kirby, ‘Rhetorical Situations’, pp. 198–9. 37 Ibid. Barr, ‘Ethical Reading’, p. 372. A. J. P. Garrow, Revelation (New Testament Readings; London: Routledge, 1997). See especially the summary of his approach, p. 2. 36 38


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commentaries of Aune and Beale provide an invaluable mass of data, background information, and bibliographical leads with which to work.39 But the very volume of information in these commentaries also highlights the need for a discriminatory hermeneutic criterion by which to evaluate the significance of proposed background information for the understanding of the text. This study will show that Relevance Theory provides such a criterion. In Chapter 2, therefore, I summarize Relevance Theory as proposed by Sperber and Wilson, and discuss its application to the interpretation of texts. I then examine implications of RT for the study of biblical text in general and the Apocalypse in particular, in interaction with other pragmatic approaches including Speech Act Theory, and discussions of intertextuality. The chapter concludes with a definition of the relevancetheoretic methodology to be used. Chapter 3 discusses both the external and the internal context of the book of Revelation. First, it provides a summary of the assumptions about the historical, social, and literary context of the book which underlie the subsequent work. And secondly, it summarizes the results of an analysis of the discourse structure of the book from a Relevance-Theoretic perspective.40 This analysis identifies three roles in which the people of God are present in the Apocalypse, as addressees of the prophetic letter, as audience of the vision narration, and as actors within the visionary drama. Further, it locates each of these appearances in textual units defined by relevance criteria, and relates these textual units hierarchically within the overall structure of the book. Thus it locates the passages of greatest interest within the vision narration of 4:1–22:9. The ensuing three chapters contain the central exegetical treatment, tracing connected themes relating to the people of God as actors through the vision narrative, and exploring their impact on the audience and addressees. Chapter 4 begins with the first actual visionary depiction of the people of God, as the souls of the slaughtered under the altar (Rev. 6:9–11), and follows themes relating to martyrdom through the book. Chapter 5 traces what might be labelled militaristic depictions of the 39 Aune, Revelation 1–5; D. E. Aune, Revelation 6–16 (WBC, 52b; Dallas: Word, 1998); D. E. Aune, Revelation 17–22 (WBC, 52c; Dallas: Word, 1998); Beale, Revelation. 40 My doctoral dissertation, S. W. Pattemore, ‘The People of God in the Apocalypse: A Relevance-Theoretic Study’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Dunedin: University of Otago, 2000), addressed both discourse-structural and exegetical issues. The structural studies have been published as S. W. Pattemore, Souls under the Altar: Relevance Theory and the Discourse Structure of Revelation (UBS Monograph Series, 9, New York: UBS, 2003), while the present volume contains the exegetical work. To avoid confusion with Chapter 4 of the present volume, the UBS publication will be abbreviated as Discourse Structure.

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people of God, from Revelation 7 forwards. These turn out to paint, not a triumphalistic picture, but one of victory through suffering after the pattern of the Messiah. Chapter 6 briefly shows how the various threads are woven together in the picture of the New Jerusalem. Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the results of the study and evaluates the part that Relevance Theory has played in it.

2 R E L E VA N C E T H E O RY I N B I B L I C A L I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

2.1

Introduction

How do humans communicate their thoughts to one another? An influential paradigm over several decades has been the code model, whereby a sender encodes a thought in a linguistic message which is transmitted by some medium to a receiver, who decodes the message to produce a replication of the original thought.1 While this model may accurately represent some physical communication processes, it has at best only partial success with the psychological dimensions of human communication. In particular, it offers no adequate explanation for the importance of inference at all levels (from simple gestures, through figures of speech such as hyperbole and irony, all the way to complex symbolic representation and institutional language), whereby what is communicated is something other than what is encoded in the message. Relevance Theory (RT), as developed by Sperber and Wilson, provides a rigorous, pragmatic account of the process of communication, including especially the role of inference.2 In this chapter I shall summarize the theory, note some reactions 1 Since C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), especially pp. 5, 95–113. A modified version of their diagram is presented by Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, pp. 4–5. For the remainder of this chapter, the latter work will be referred to simply as Relevance. Page references apply to both first and second editions, except for the Postface to the second edition (1995), pp. 255–79. References to this will be noted explicitly. 2 Pragmatics was defined by Charles W. Morris in 1938 as ‘the relations between signs and interpreters’, or later in 1946 as ‘that branch of semiotics which studies the origin, the uses and the effects of signs’. See C. W. Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 6, 365. Modern linguistic accounts of pragmatics begin here, but the precise definition is problematical. See the long discussion in S. C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–35. My use of the term in this chapter assumes such working concepts as ‘language in use’ or ‘language in context’ (see Levinson, Pragmatics, p. 32). Levinson clearly distinguishes this linguistic sense from philosophical pragmatism (p. 1). A finer, but no less critical, distinction is implied by Thiselton’s critique of what he calls ‘socio-pragmatic hermeneutics’. See, for example, A. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), pp. 6–7.

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to it, and then discuss its application to the interpretation of literary texts, with particular focus on its implications for understanding the Bible. This will lead to a summary of how RT might be used to investigate the Apocalypse. 2.2

Relevance Theory Background

Sperber and Wilson, while acknowledging that encoding and decoding take place in communication, hold that these processes are inadequate to explain how communication works, unless supplemented by, or subordinated to, a process of implication and inference: [T]he linguistic meaning of an uttered sentence falls short of encoding what the speaker means: it merely helps the audience infer what she means. The output of decoding is correctly treated by the audience as a piece of evidence about the communicator’s intentions. In other words, a coding–decoding process is subservient to a Gricean inferential process.3 RT is grounded on the inferential theory of H. P. Grice, who proposed a ‘principle of co-operation in conversation’: ‘Make your conversation contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’4 This he filled out with nine maxims setting guidelines for quantity, quality, relevance, and manner of a conversational contribution. The importance of Grice’s work is not that the various maxims provide rules or codes for successful communication but that they describe how communication creates the conditions for its own success. ‘Grice put forward an idea of fundamental importance: that the very act of communicating creates expectations which it then exploits.’5 Successful communication depends on shared information, but what is the nature of this shared information? Rejecting ideas of ‘mutual knowledge’ and ‘shared knowledge’ as either empirically or conceptually 3 Relevance, p. 27. Note the convention of assuming a female speaker/author and male listener/reader. 4 H. P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in H. P. Grice (ed.), Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 26. The quotation is from a reprint of his 1975 paper, ‘Logic and Conversation’. 5 Relevance, p. 37.

Relevance Theory in biblical interpretation

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deficient, Sperber and Wilson fix on the concept of manifestness and use it to define a cognitive environment: A fact is manifest to an individual at a given time if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true . . . A cognitive environment of an individual is a set of facts that are manifest to him . . . [Which assumptions are more manifest to an individual during a given period or at a given moment is again a function of his physical environment on the one hand and his cognitive abilities on the other.]6 Two or more people can share a cognitive environment. This does not imply that they do make the same assumptions but that they can do so. This leads to the idea of a mutual cognitive environment – one in which it is manifest which people share it. ‘In a mutual cognitive environment every manifest assumption is . . . mutually manifest.’7 This concept is considerably weaker than ‘mutual knowledge’ and in addition cannot guarantee that communicator and audience will make a symmetrical choice of context and code to use in a communication situation. But Sperber and Wilson assert that this asymmetry is inherent in communication anyway: It is left to the communicator to make correct assumptions about the codes and contextual information that the audience will have accessible and be likely to use in the comprehension process. The responsibility for avoiding misunderstandings also lies with the speaker, so that all the hearer has to do is go ahead and use whatever code and contextual information come most readily to hand.8 On this basis, communication is seen as the attempt to change the cognitive environment of another person, and thus to enlarge the scope of what is mutually manifest to both communicator and audience. Clearly no audience can explore and classify all possible contextual implications of a given utterance.9 There must be a selecting and limiting process. Information which is totally new, with no connection to the audience’s existing cognitive environment, will have no contextual implications.10 Neither will old information. It is information that is new but has connections 6 9

7 Ibid., p. 42. 8 Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 39. A contextual implication is a conclusion derived from a combination of existing assumptions and new information. It is formed by the interpretation of new propositions within a particular context. See ibid., pp. 107–8. 10 It may have its own logical implications.

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with the existing environment which will have the greatest contextual effects (including negating, strengthening, extending, or enriching existing assumptions). This is relevant information in Sperber and Wilson’s terminology. Before defining ‘relevance’ more precisely we should note a further underlying concept, ostension. ‘Ostensive behaviour is behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest.’11 This has to do with the self-conscious nature of human communication. It not only conveys information, but conveys the intention to convey information. This allows for weaker or non-verbal communication as well as communication by structured propositional language. Thus communication consists of two levels of intention: ‘Informative intention: to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions {I} . . . Communicative intention: to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention.’12 These ideas combine to give the following definition: Ostensive-inferential communication: the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions {I}.13

Relevance Relevance, if it is to provide an account of human communication which is not only descriptive but explanatory, must be defined in a quantifiable way. Different contextual effects and implications have to be able to be judged more or less relevant. This does not require an absolute scale of relevance, but a comparative one. For this purpose Sperber and Wilson define ‘extent conditions’: Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large. Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small.14 11 13

12 Ibid., pp. 58, 61. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 61. A similar idea was stated much earlier (1969) by Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 63. 14 Relevance, p. 125.


17

These two conditions illustrate the fundamental insight of Relevance Theory – that human cognition takes place in a balancing act between processing effort and contextual effect. Communication works because the audience make the assumption that the communicator intends to communicate and intends to be relevant. The audience do not need to determine in advance the context within which to process a communication. Sperber and Wilson suggest that the choice of an appropriate context continues through the comprehension process and is governed by the search for relevance. The immediate context in which an utterance occurs is only a starting point, and the context for comprehension can be extended in one or more different directions throughout the comprehension process. These include short-term memory of earlier parts of the conversation (often referenced by anaphoric pronouns), encyclopaedic entries on particular words retrieved from memory, or features of the physical environment (often indicated by deictic pronouns). ‘These factors determine not a single context but a range of possible contexts. What determines the selection of a particular context . . . is . . . the search for relevance.’15 The audience does not take a particular context as given and proceed to assess the relevance of the communication. Instead relevance is taken as given and a context selected to justify that assumption. This leads Sperber and Wilson to enunciate what they call ‘the presumption of optimal relevance’, which, as modified in the second edition of Relevance, states: Presumption of optimal relevance (revised) (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it. (b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences.16 An audience understands a communication by bringing to it the most accessible elements of the mutual cognitive environment and deciding on the meaning that produces the best contextual effects for the least processing effort. The communicator, knowing this, produces the stimulus which will lead the receptor to his intended meaning. This explanation is summarized by two principles of relevance.17 The ‘First 15 16

Ibid., pp. 141. See pp. 137–41 for the discussion. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 2nd edn, p. 270. Compare the original statement in Relevance, p. 158. The modified statement allows that the actual relevance may not be the absolute maximum, but may be influenced by the speaker’s aims, priorities, and abilities. 17 Relevance, 2nd edn, pp. 260–1. In the first edition, Relevance, p. 158, there was only one principle, the second of these. The first was an underlying assumption. The change is ‘expository and not substantive’ (p. 271). By the ‘principle of relevance’ I normally intend the second.

18


(or Cognitive) Principle’ is the fundamental claim: ‘Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.’ The ‘Second (or Communicative) Principle’ encapsulates the nature of ostensive communication: ‘Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.’ Language usage In order to show how the principle of relevance explains a range of human language use, Sperber and Wilson first distinguish between the explicit and implicit assumptions conveyed by an utterance. Explicit assumptions (explicatures) are only those that are a development of the logical form encoded in the utterance – all others are implicit (implicatures). The understanding of both implicit and explicit assumptions involves an inferential process governed by the principle of relevance. To understand the explicatures of an utterance it is necessary to identify its propositional form. Relevance Theory accepts that often this will be simply derived from its syntactic and semantic form. But the audience may need to process this surface form in order to achieve relevance. Ambiguities must be resolved using contextual clues, pronouns must be assigned referents, and the connotations of semantically incomplete items must be enriched. At every stage in disambiguation, reference assignment and enrichment the hearer should choose the solution involving the least effort, and should abandon this solution only if it fails to yield an interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance.18 The search for relevance by a trade-off between contextual effects and processing effort can also explain the way in which stylistic features of an utterance affect the meaning. Sperber and Wilson examine such features as word order and placement of focal stress, backgrounding and foregrounding, and structural features such as topic–comment, given– new, and focus–presupposition distinctions. They conclude: Given that utterances have constituent structure, internal order and focal stress, and given that they are processed over time, the most cost-efficient way of exploiting these structural features will give rise to a variety of pragmatic effects. There is a 18

Relevance, p. 185.


19

natural linkage between linguistic structure and pragmatic interpretation, and no need for any special pragmatic conventions or interpretation rules: the speaker merely adapts her utterance to the way the hearer is going to process it anyhow, given the existing structural and temporal constraints.19 Turning to implicatures, Sperber and Wilson make the hermeneutically significant assertion that there is no sharp division between strong implicatures of an utterance which are clearly intended by the speaker and weak implicatures for which the hearer ‘takes the entire responsibility’. Clearly the weaker the implicatures the less confidence the hearer can have that the particular premises or conclusions he supplies will reflect the speaker’s thoughts and this is where the indeterminacy lies. However, people may entertain different thoughts and come to have different beliefs on the basis of the same cognitive environment. The aim of communication in general is to increase the mutuality of cognitive environments rather than guarantee an impossible duplication of thoughts.20 This sliding scale of implicatures with corresponding movement of responsibility from speaker to hearer is interestingly illustrated by the spectrum of contemporary hermeneutic strategies. But it should be noted that it is only in the limiting cases that the hearer assumes full responsibility. Weak implicatures are significantly exploited by the communicator to achieve, amongst other things, a wide range of poetic effects. This too is a reflection of the principle of relevance, as a speaker can often achieve a large degree of relevance ‘through a wide array of weak implicatures’.21 To analyse some of these poetic effects and to account for the pragmatics of speech acts, Sperber and Wilson make a further important distinction: between descriptive and interpretive use of language. An utterance is used descriptively if it ‘represent[s] some state of affairs in virtue of its propositional form being true of that state of affairs’.22 It is used interpretively if it represents some other utterance in virtue of a resemblance between the propositional forms of the two utterances. Now every utterance is already an interpretation of a thought of the speaker. This thought may be either a description of an actual state of affairs or of a desirable state of affairs, or an interpretation of an attributed thought or a desirable thought (of the speaker or some other person). This schema, together with the principle of relevance, is capable of explaining metaphor, irony, and the whole range of speech acts. 19

Ibid., p. 217.

20

Ibid., pp. 199–200.

21

Ibid., p. 222.

22

Ibid., p. 228.

20


Metaphor is towards the end of a sliding scale of language use which begins with ‘literal use’ and proceeds through various degrees of ‘loose’ uses. Most utterances have some degree of looseness, and ‘the hearer should take an utterance as fully literal only when nothing less than full literality will confirm the presence of relevance . . . the element of indirectness in an utterance must be offset by some increase in contextual effects’.23 Not only metaphors, but also a wide range of related figures of speech, are interpreted by a hearer on the basis of the search for optimal relevance. Irony is similarly treated, not as a special case but as an example of echoic utterance – a re-expression of another thought or utterance with the expression of an attitude (of disapproval or ridicule) towards it. Once again the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts provide the clues in the search for relevance.24 Sperber and Wilson accept the usefulness of Speech Act Theory as a descriptive tool, but argue against the necessity for any special explanatory framework for the operation of speech acts. Speech acts do not have to be recognized as such in order to be effective, but ‘[a] speaker who wants to achieve some particular effect should give whatever explicit cues are needed to ensure that the interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance is the one she intended to convey’.25 Reactions and development Relevance Theory has proved to be a robust and seminal theory, as evidenced by the amount and diversity of continuing work based on it. While it has from its introduction stirred lively debate within the linguistics community, it stands as the most significant development since Grice in understanding the pragmatics of human communication.26 The fundamental insights from RT have been applied and developed in areas 23 Ibid., p. 234. Similarly G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors we Live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 166–9, argued that the process of understanding even a simple sentence as true shows the importance of inference and contextual assumptions, even when the only metaphors are institutionalized or dead ones. 24 For developments in the RT treatment of irony see D. Wilson and D. Sperber, ‘On Verbal Irony’, Lingua 87 (1992), pp. 53–76, and contributions to the ‘Symposium on Irony’ included in R. Carston and S. Uchida (eds.), Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications (PBNS, 37; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), pp. 239–95. 25 Relevance, p. 249. 26 A convenient summary of the theory, followed by an ‘Open Peer Commentary’, which contains a range of responses, positive and negative, can be found in D. Sperber and D. Wilson, ‘Précis of Relevance: Cognition and Context’, BBS 10 (1987), pp. 697–754.


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as diverse as anthropology, psychology, pragmatics, stylistics, discourse structure, computer modelling, literary interpretation, and translation.27 But of greatest significance for the application of the theory to the interpretation of biblical texts is the continuing work in the areas of pragmatics, literary style, discourse structure, and translation.28 The second edition of Relevance, as well as revising the way in which some of the main propositions are expressed, also contains extensive bibliographic notes and references, charting the reactions to and developments arising from the original publication of the theory.29 Apart from conventional bibliographic sources on relevance, note should be made of several reputable world-wide web sites which maintain up-to-date information on RT and papers available for download.30 Several areas touched on by Sperber and Wilson in the course of their treatment of relevance would seem to offer potentially important insights into the study of biblical texts. The first arises from the fact that contemporary study of the biblical text takes place in an interlingual environment. Scholars working in the original languages are nevertheless bringing their understanding into their own language environment. Thus consideration of interlingual interpretive usage and translation are of significance. But this issue is part of a wider question, the applicability of RT to the interpretation (whether inter- or intralingual) of literary texts, which has engendered considerable debate. Section 2.3 will seek to address this question, 27 Linguistic applications include several contributions in F. J. Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (4 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): R. M. Kempson, ‘Grammar and Conversational Principles’, in vol. II, pp. 139–63; R. Carston, ‘Language and Cognition’, in vol. III, pp. 38–68; D. Blakemore, ‘Organisation of Discourse’, in vol. IV, pp. 229–50. Note also D. Blakemore, Understanding Utterances (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); V. Rouchota and A. H. Jucker (eds.), Current Issues in Relevance Theory (PBNS, 58; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998). 28 Literary interpretation will be the focus of section 2.3, pp. 22–31, and discourse analysis will be treated in section 3.3, pp. 60–7. Note the recent collection of papers relating to applications of RT, Carston and Uchida, Relevance Theory p. 22. This contains a useful glossary of RT terms (pp. 295–9). There are also valuable surveys of the developments and applications of RT, with extensive bibliographies, in the introduction to a special issue of the journal Lingua, N. Smith and D. Wilson, ‘Introduction’, Lingua 87 (1992), pp. 1–10, and in F. Yus, ‘A Decade of Relevance Theory’, JPrag 30 (1998), pp. 305–45. 29 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 2nd edn, pp. 255–60, 295–8. See also the discussion of the changes made to the presentation, in I. Higashimori and D. Wilson, ‘Questions on Relevance’, UCLWPL 8 (1996), pp. 111–24. 30 Relevance Home Page, UCL (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/relevance/ home.htm); Department of English, University of Alicante, Spain (http://www.ua.es/ dfing/rt.htm); Department of Foreign Languages, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China (http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/personal/szliu/RT cognitprag.html); Dan Sperber’s home page (http://www.dan.sperber.com/); and a site for academic publications on cognitive sciences (http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/).

22


examining ways in which RT has been applied to literary interpretation, and the objections raised, before drawing some conclusions about the benefits of and constraints on the use of RT in literary interpretation. Section 2.4 will bring the discussion closer to our focal text, by examining some of the implications of RT for study of biblical documents. Then there are significant links between structure and pragmatic effects of a text. This implies that discourse analysis of any text should be done with respect to the principle of relevance. This issue will be further discussed in Chapter 3, section 3.3. 2.3

Relevance and literary interpretation Preliminary considerations

Relevance Theory claims not so much to be a ‘better theory’ for the understanding of human cognition as to provide the underlying pathway for all theories. The search for relevance is thus a criterion at all levels of language analysis including the interpretation of literary texts. Sperber and Wilson developed RT largely with reference to short utterances of spoken language, in face-to-face contexts, and their spontaneous interpretation. Our interests are in the study and interpretation of (ancient) texts, extended written documents. The use of RT on such material involves a leap in scale, medium, and communication situation and raises questions of the validity of relevance in this new environment. A few quotations illustrate the fact that the authors of the theory saw no intrinsic problem with making this leap: When communication is non-reciprocal, there are various possible situations . . . The communicator may be in a position of such authority over her audience that success of her informative intention is mutually manifest in advance. Journalists, professors, religious or political leaders assume, alas often on good grounds, that what they communicate automatically becomes mutually manifest.31 We assume . . . that the lengthy and highly self-conscious processes of textual interpretation that religious or literary scholars engage in are governed just as much by the principle of relevance as is spontaneous utterance comprehension.32 The addressees of an act of ostensive communication are the individuals whose cognitive environment the communicator is 31

Relevance, p. 61.

32

Ibid., p. 75.


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trying to modify . . . they may be individuals falling under a certain description, as when we address the present paragraph to all individuals who have read the book so far and found it relevant to them. In broadcast communication, a stimulus can even be addressed to whoever finds it relevant. The communicator is then communicating her presumption of relevance to whoever is willing to entertain it.33 The change in scale would appear to present no intrinsic obstacle to the applicability of RT given the power of human cognition to grasp and conduct a sustained argument. Nor is the change to text as medium a problem – the main implication is that the text itself becomes the most accessible context (or concentric set of contexts) within which the search for relevance takes place. It is the change to a communication situation that is non-immediate and non-reciprocal which presents the greatest challenge to the relevance of relevance. It is suggested by some that literary texts are in some way different from other modes of communication, in such a way that relevance no longer applies or is no longer a useful concept in interpreting them.34 In particular it is alleged that RT tends to indulge the ‘intentional fallacy’.35 These are issues of central importance which we shall continue to address over the following paragraphs, but there are at least three valid lines of approach. First, intentionality is a presumption made before interpreting any communication and is consistently used in the ‘trivial’ pursuit of comprehension, by disambiguation, reference assignment (for example of pronouns), and grammatical parsing, before a more self-conscious interpretation process begins. Secondly, there is the problem (or perhaps impossibility) of defining literary text as a genre.36 How do so-called literary texts signal in non-semantic and non-pragmatic ways that they are literary texts and so require different strategies of interpretation from ordinary texts? Thirdly, literary effects have, as we shall see, been satisfactorily accounted for in RT terms. 33 34

Ibid., p. 158. A vigorous debate on this subject took place on the relevance internet mailing list in late 1999. Unfortunately contributions were not archived before 2000. A similar debate is reflected in K. Green, ‘Butterflies, Wheels and the Search for Literary Relevance’, LL 6 (1997), pp. 133–8; A. Pilkington, B. MacMahon, and B. Clark, ‘Looking for an Argument: A Response to Green’, LL 6 (1997), pp. 139–48. 35 Following W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in W. K. Wimsatt (ed.), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), pp. 3–18. Note the remark on p. 3: ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’. 36 Following T. Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 1–12.

24

The People of God in the Apocalypse RT as a tool of literary interpretation

Sperber and Wilson offered accounts based on RT for the working of a wide range of tropes and other literary effects, such as metaphor, irony, or repetition. But its application to genres such as fiction, parable, poetry, or myth must first counter the criticism that RT takes no explicit account of the truth-value of a proposition in assessing its relevance.37 Sperber and Wilson respond to this objection by pointing out that the truth-value of a proposition will have an influence on the ‘cognitive effects’ side of the balance sheet.38 This is developed further in the Postface to the second edition of Relevance. Rejecting the necessity for the input of a cognitive process to be ‘true’ in order to be relevant, the authors assert that the result of processing the input must be ‘positive cognitive effects’, that is, effects that contribute ‘positively to the fulfillment of cognitive functions or goals’.39 Herbert Clark has queried whether RT can account for the layers of meaning involved in fictional writing. He points out that all fiction involves at least two layers, or domains, of communication – between characters in the work and between the author and the reader. Quoting examples from Moby Dick and Hamlet, he argues: Melville and Shakespeare have intentions towards us, but these are not ‘informative’ or ‘communicative intentions’ . . . and the principle of relevance does not apply. So when Melville and Shakespeare ‘communicate’ with us, it is communication of a fundamentally different type . . . even if Relevance Theory could explain how the Nantucket landsmen understood Ishmael and how Ophelia understood Hamlet, it would not explain how we do.40 But RT is certainly able to handle multiple layers of meaning and intentionality. As the authors respond: ‘a first-level act of ostensive communication can serve as an ostensive stimulus for a second-level act of ostensive communication . . . [for example] deliberate ambiguity at one level can 37 See the comments of J. E. Adler, ‘Comparisons with Grice’, BBS 10 (1987), pp. 710–11. 38 See further D. Wilson and D. Sperber, ‘Inference and Implicature’, in C. Travis (ed.), Meaning and Interpretation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 63–5; and D. Wilson and D. Sperber, ‘Representation and Relevance’, in R. Kempson (ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 134–9, where the authors develop the concept of interpretive resemblance of an utterance to the thought it expresses and replace a guarantee of truth by a guarantee of faithfulness. 39 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 2nd edn, p. 265. 40 H. H. Clark, ‘Relevance to What?’, BBS 10 (1987), pp. 714–15.


25

be used as a non-ambiguous ostensive stimulus at another level.’41 These considerations would appear to be relevant not just to works of fiction but to any literary work (and thus to biblical interpretation). To the layers suggested by Clark we need to add the implied author–implied audience layer and the possibility of multiple embedded layering within the work itself. Relevance applies on each level, but not only are the potential contexts for each level different (and perhaps embedded), but they exist in different worlds (also potentially embedded). A number of authors have defended and demonstrated RT’s usefulness in literary interpretation.42 Of particular interest is the work of Adrian Pilkington on the use of rhetorical tropes and schemes.43 He develops in some depth the treatment of metaphor already found in Sperber and Wilson, and goes further to consider other schemes and verse effects, such as repetition, metre, rhyme, and alliteration.44 Most importantly, in view of the frequent criticism that RT by focussing on cognitive effects cannot adequately explain the emotive and affective components of a literary text, Pilkington directly addresses the issue of the emotional and attitudinal effects of poetry. He stresses that poetic effects rely on a ‘wide range of assumptions being simultaneously made marginally more salient’.45 Hence the increase in processing effort required by poetic texts: The route of least effort would not lead immediately to the selection or construction of a narrow range of easily accessible contextual assumptions, it would lead to the selection and construction of a wider range of assumptions after a lengthier and more extensive search.46 41 42

Sperber and Wilson, ‘Précis’, p. 751. For example D. Trotter, ‘Analysing Literary Prose: The Relevance of Relevance Theory’, Lingua 87 (1992), pp. 11–27, who examines the writings of Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce; S. Uchida, ‘Text and Relevance’, in Carston and Uchida, Relevance Theory, pp. 161–78, who uses RT to describe ‘suspense’ and ‘twist’; and more recently I. MacKenzie, Paradigms of Reading: Relevance Theory and Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), who holds that RT offers a better explanation of the force of literature than does the deconstructive theory of Paul de Man. 43 First in A. Pilkington, ‘Poetic Effects’, Lingua 87 (1992), pp. 29–51. Most of my comments are in reference to his Ph.D. thesis, A. Pilkington, ‘Poetic Thoughts and Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Account of the Literary Use of Rhetorical Tropes’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 1994). This work is now published by John Benjamins. For more on a relevance approach to literary style see B. Clark, ‘Stylistic Analysis and Relevance Theory’, LL 5 (1996), pp. 163–78; B. MacMahon, ‘Indirectness, Rhetoric and Interpretive Use: Communication Strategies in Browning’s My Last Duchess’, LL 5 (1996), pp. 207–23; A. Pilkington, ‘Introduction: Relevance Theory and Literary Style’, LL 5 (1996), pp. 157–62. 44 For metaphor see Pilkington, ‘Poetic Thoughts’, pp. 111–53. For schemes and verse effects see pp. 154–75. 45 Ibid., ‘Poetic Thoughts’, p. 176. 46 Ibid.

26


His conclusions about the way in which poetic texts influence their audience demonstrate that relevance is not equivalent to ‘easy listening’: Poetry or literary writing encourages us to exercise and develop introspective acuity. The aesthetic qualitative experience it communicates is ‘intensive’ and ‘discriminating’. The achievement of poetic effects requires a wider exploration of contexts that reorganizes encyclopaedic memory and establishes and rearranges links between concepts. Developing introspective acuity is partly a question of encouraging such reorganization and making the links and wide-ranging contextual effects more salient.47 Anne Furlong attempts a wider treatment of literary interpretation under RT, based on her assessment of the weakness of existing approaches because of their common dependence on the code model of communication.48 A significant cornerstone of her construction of a relevancetheoretic approach is the concept of context, which includes information drawn from the preceding text and the situation in which an utterance is made (and by whom: narrator or characters); but it also involves other knowledge, beliefs or assumptions the reader uses in interpretation . . . it is information that the reader can call to mind at the time he is reading the work.49 Careful readers are led to expend more processing effort than is required to reach a first meaning by the existence of features of the text (lexical, stylistic, structural etc.) which are unnecessary or unaccounted for by the effects of that first meaning: There are two ways, then, in which unaccommodated elements of the text can be treated. They may be evidence of stylistic failure on the writer’s part; or they may be evidence that the optimally relevant intended interpretation has not yet been found.50 Furlong goes on to deal in detail with a number of features of literature, overlapping with Pilkington.51 But the most important contribution of this work for our present purposes is the distinction she makes between 47 48

Ibid., ‘Poetic Thoughts’, p. 220. A. Furlong, ‘Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 1996), pp. 6–25. 49 Ibid., p. 60. 50 Ibid., p. 71. 51 See especially her treatment of indeterminacy and poetic effects (pp. 81–133), repetition (pp. 151–70), and irony (pp. 170–87).


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exegetical and eisegetical interpretations. Exegetical interpretations are further distinguished as spontaneous or literary. Both of these ‘depend crucially on the reader recognizing the writer’s intentions’.52 The difference between them is that while a spontaneous interpretation (such as a casual reader or inexperienced reader might make) may reach optimal relevance for that reader, insufficient effort has been expended to achieve an optimally relevant interpretation of the text.53 Contrasted with both of these are eisegetical interpretations, which always, or mostly, go beyond what is warranted by the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance. They involve actual rather than intended relevance, and involve looking for the greatest possible effect in return for the smallest possible effort: that is, maximal rather than optimal relevance.54 It is in this category that she classifies the many ‘interested’ interpretations of literature which ‘do not typically aim to recognize the writer’s overt intentions so much as they aim to discover accidental or covert information transfer’.55 These include literary-historical, socioeconomic, feminist, psychoanalytic, or political interpretations, which Furlong prefers to call ‘commentaries’ or varieties of eisegetical interpretation. However, the fundamental point about literary interpretation is that ‘precisely because literary works are cases of ostensive-inferential communication we are justified in producing interpretations (exegetical, both spontaneous and literary) of them’.56 It is suggested by some, including some advocates of RT, that the theory is able to explain an interpretation but does not provide a list of instructions for making one. This is, in many ways, a helpful distinction to make. Explaining interpretations is the work of criticism, and there is general agreement that RT is useful in this regard. But Furlong has argued, convincingly in my view, that making interpretations is also guided by the search for relevance, whether optimal relevance (in the case of spontaneous or literary interpretations) or maximal relevance (in the case of eisegetical interpretations). The search for relevance is an unconscious influence, rather than a focussed tool, in all cases. In addition it is questionable whether the distinction between making and explaining an interpretation is rigorously valid. For in explaining an interpretation (of a text) one is also making an interpretation but of a different text, namely 52 53

Ibid., p. 199. See the whole treatment on pp. 189–98. 54 Ibid., p. 194. 55 Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 195.

56

Ibid.

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of the interpretation of which the original text is the sub-text. A more helpful distinction will be suggested in the following section. Ostensive communication and the question of intentionality Central to many of the concerns we have discussed with regard to the applicability of RT to literary interpretation is the requirement under RT to treat texts as examples of ostensive communication in a mutual cognitive environment. This is seen to conflict with the dominant paradigm of contemporary literary criticism, namely that the author’s context and intentions are inaccessible and unnecessary to interpretation. Ricoeur’s ‘threefold semantic autonomy’ of the text suggests that a text is cut off from its author’s intentions and from its original context, and is no longer able to refer ostensively.57 Several points in favour of RT can be made in this regard. First, RT does treat a text as a record of a genuine communication event. And in this regard, Gibbs has pointed out that the attribution of intentions is a normal part of the human understanding process: ‘We ordinarily attribute intentions to other people and animals in a wide variety of everyday interactions.’58 He goes on to argue that the same applies to the interpretation of texts, as well as utterances or even artworks: How ordinary readers, listeners, and expert critics understand and form interpretations of meaning requires cognitive effort that takes place in real time, starting with the first moments when people move their eyes across a page . . . up to later moments when we consciously, deliberatively reflect upon what has been seen or read . . . [C]ritics often ignore considerations of what is known about how people actually experience meaning, including the possibility that people immediately, and unconsciously, seek out authorial intentions when they read . . .59 Secondly, we should note that RT does not guarantee the recovery of the author’s intended meaning. The one assumption which must be correctly 57 P. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 30; P. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 145. See also K. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 109, n. 7. 58 R. W. Gibbs, Intentions in the Experience of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5. 59 Ibid., p. 15. See also his extensive treatment of literary interpretation, pp. 234–72.


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conveyed for communication to take place is the Communicative Intention, which establishes the conditions for ostensive communication.60 Thereafter the form of the communication (for example the text itself) suggests a double responsibility for meaning. Thus, on the one hand, It is left to the communicator to make correct assumptions about the codes and contextual information that the audience will have accessible and be likely to use in the comprehension process. The responsibility for avoiding misunderstandings also lies with the speaker, so that all the hearer has to do is go ahead and use whatever code and contextual information come most readily to hand.61 But on the other hand, ‘Fulfilment of the communicator’s informative intentions is in the hands of the audience and this is itself mutually manifest.’62 Central to both directions of interest is the mutual cognitive environment of communicator and audience or, more simply, context. The audience is entitled to use the text within the mutual cognitive environment to determine the author’s informative intentions. This will suggest a way for the scholar to engage with the text. But first we must consider the factors unique to the interpretation of literary texts, including the Bible. It is necessary in considering literary texts to distinguish synchronic from diachronic communication situations. The original communication event in which the author transmitted her writings to a particular audience (which may or may not be explicitly defined) is a synchronic situation. Two types of communication situation can be described as diachronic: the situation of subsequent ordinary readers of the text, cut off from the original context; and that of the scholar studying either of the previous two situations. The problem in each case is to establish whether there is a mutual cognitive environment within which the search for relevance can be seen to guide both author and audience. In the original communication event there can be little doubt of the existence of a large number of shared cognitive contexts, beginning from the text itself and widening to include the life situations of the audience and author (including a large set of mutually manifest assumptions concerning history, geography, culture, and language), and an array of other texts (oral and written) to which the author can assume the audience has access. Relevance is most certainly an operating principle in the author’s construction of the text and in the audience’s interpretation of it. 60

See p. 16 above.

61

Relevance, p. 43.

62

Ibid., p. 60.

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By virtue of committing a text to writing an author implicitly offers it to a wider and less clearly defined audience, or indeed to ‘anyone who finds it relevant’. Nevertheless, there may well be a greater degree of shared cognitive environment than is at first apparent. Once again it begins with the text itself, but this context can be widened (contra Ricoeur). The author will assume that her wider audience shares assumptions derived from membership of a particular linguistic, or cultural, or national community. These may be quite specific, as in the case that will concern us in this study of a community of faith, where other texts, beliefs, traditions, and practices may well be assumed. Ostensive reference within such contexts is possible, though deixis may at times be problematic.63 The more removed the audience, the smaller is the extent of the mutual cognitive environment. This will not diminish the importance of the search for relevance in the audience’s interpretation of the text, but it will mean a progressive loss in confidence that the derived meaning in any way represents the author’s intentions.64 Contemporary secular use of apocalyptic language would appear to be a case in point. The scholar or critic is a special case of the ‘subsequent ordinary reader’. The considerations of shared context just noted therefore apply. Scholars are more self-conscious in their search for meaning, but are nonetheless guided both directly and indirectly by the principle of relevance.65 Indirectly, the assumption that the communication to original or subsequent ordinary readers operated by the principle of relevance reaffirms the fundamental importance of historical-critical research, in order to discover the nature of the mutual cognitive environments within which the communication and its interpretation took place.66 Directly, relevance 63 Deixis is a characteristically pragmatic concept, which Levinson, Pragmatics, p. 54 defines in the following way: ‘The term is borrowed from the Greek word for pointing or indicating, and has as prototypical exemplars the use of demonstratives, first and second person pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs like now and here, and a variety of other grammatical features tied directly to the circumstances of utterance . . . Essentially deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event’ (bold type in the original). 64 In the limiting case, the audience’s interests dominate, subvert, or eliminate the author’s. This is similar to Furlong’s ‘eisegetical interpretation’ and to the ‘socio-pragmatic hermeneutics’ extensively critiqued by Thiselton (see below, p. 33). 65 This is true even though the author can have had no intention to communicate to later scholars, or to subject her communication to their scrutiny. G. B. Caird, New Testament Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 2, comments of the biblical authors: ‘They never dreamt that what they wrote would, centuries later, be subjected to the microscopic scrutiny of modern biblical scholarship, providing in every unusual phrase and every unexpressed assumption matter for a doctoral dissertation.’ 66 Again this interest which RT both exemplifies and explains was anticipated by Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, p. 63: ‘The essential question which we therefore confront,


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influences the work of scholars and critics even if they are unaware of it, because their conclusions will be those that, in their opinion, best explain the data available, i.e. are optimally relevant to them. This suggests the need for caution when the text appears to yield no adequate meaning as it stands. Rather than quickly proposing textual emendations or attributing the current text to the work of editors or redactors, it may be necessary to admit that there is failure of relevance on the diachronic level rather than on the synchronic.67 But even more directly, to ‘use Relevance Theory’ in the interpretation of texts is to bring to conscious focus a factor which is operative whether or not the interpreter is aware of it. It involves examining how the form of the text might have achieved optimal relevance, interacting with the reader’s cognitive environment(s) to produce good cognitive effects. It will involve careful analysis of the output of historical-critical research to determine which cognitive environments may have been more accessible than others, yielding good cognitive effects without gratuitous processing effort. Thus by investigating the ‘readers’ meaning’, and with the assumption that the author is aiming for optimal relevance with respect to her intended meaning, the scholar is provided with the best possible clues to the author’s intentions.68 2.4

Relevance Theory and the Bible

Relevance Theory has provided a robust and adaptable explanation for the mechanisms of human communication, including those involved in the production and reception of literary texts. To the extent that the Bible in studying any given text, is what its author, in writing at the time he did write for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given utterance.’ 67 Note the comment by historian R. H. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), pp. 218–19: ‘When he finds certain historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind; he has discovered that there are certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not yet, able to think. Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them dark ages; but such phrases tell us nothing about these ages themselves, though they tell us a great deal about the persons who use them, namely that they are unable to rethink the thoughts which were fundamental to their life.’ 68 Another level on which relevance considerations influence the scholar is in the communication of their work. I presume, for example, that anyone reading this volume is prepared to expend considerably more processing effort in the pursuit of fruitful cognitive effects than the average reader. I also assume a mutual cognitive environment that includes not only a vast array of texts, but also sets of conventions for referring to them, and a specialized semantic domain. The responsibility for inferring my intentions, however, lies with the reader, who is entitled to access these environments in such a way as to achieve optimal relevance.

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is a human book and relies on human language, or indeed to the extent that God has entrusted his self-revelation to human language, Relevance Theory must offer potentially fruitful ways of exploring the meaning of the text.69 Yet few biblical scholars have up to this point drawn on its insights. Cotterell and Turner noted its usefulness with regard to the analysis of conversation, but did not work out the implications in detail.70 Garrow’s short commentary on Revelation, which uses RT to a limited extent, has already been mentioned. But, with the exception of scholars working in the field of Bible translation, little work has been done to apply the insights of RT to biblical text. In this section we shall briefly survey the translation field and then examine the implications of RT for the intertextual reference of the Bible (particularly the Apocalypse) and for the interpretation of imagery. But first a note on recent work in related pragmatic disciplines is in order. RT and Speech Act Theory Discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory, two linguistic theories or methodologies that arise from the same field of pragmatics as RT, have made considerable impact on recent biblical studies. The primary context of any text is the co-text with which it comes. Thus discourse analysis, the study of the pragmatic structure of texts, is of critical importance throughout this present study and is discussed in detail elsewhere.71 But Speech Act Theory, introduced to the arena of biblical interpretation by Anthony Thiselton, is no less closely related.72 Although he nowhere mentions RT, very similar pragmatic interests are at the heart of Thiselton’s own hermeneutic, as illustrated by his programmatic statement: ‘In particular, what effects biblical texts produce on thought and on life, and especially on what basis these effects come about not only challenges our theological integrity but also constitutes a burning concern for all who have some interest in the nurture of faith and its communication in the 69 I have explored elsewhere the implications of the Christian doctrine that the Bible is not only a human book but is divinely inspired. See especially Pattemore, Discourse Structure, pp. 38–45. 70 P. Cotterell and M. Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1989), specifically pp. 270–1 but also implied earlier, pp. 90–2. 71 For a brief discussion and the results of the analysis (presented fully in Discourse Structure) see Chapter 3, pp. 60–7 below. 72 See the note in Thiselton, New Horizons, p. 17, and his extensive use of it throughout this work. For the origins of Speech Act Theory see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).


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modern world.’73 It is from precisely this standpoint that he criticizes what he calls ‘socio-pragmatic hermeneutics’ with its interest in ‘the effect of the text on me and my community’, an approach which he says ‘turns on its head, and reverses, the emancipatory critiques, or liberation hermeneutics, which socio-critical hermeneutics sets in motion’, eliminates the transforming power of the text, and thus ‘ultimately betrays the function which hermeneutics arose to perform’.74 The theological and hermeneutic implications of Speech Act Theory, which sees language not merely as communicating facts but as performing actions, which in turn have consequences, has been developed notably by Thiselton, Wolterstorff, and Vanhoozer.75 But only Vanhoozer has noted the parallel significance of Relevance Theory.76 He is theologically cautious about the theoretical grounding when he says ‘For Sperber and Wilson, language is essentially a cognitive rather than communicative tool that enables an organism (or device) to process information’, and then opposes this to a ‘transcendent’ view of language in which ‘God underwrites language’ (George Steiner).77 But here he seems to miss some of the greatest significance of RT. Certainly language in the narrow sense as ‘a grammar-governed representational system’ is essentially cognitive and mechanistic. And in this sense human language is only more complex than animal language and more subtle than machine language. But this is only a starting point from which RT sets out to investigate the way in which human communication breaks these bounds. The subtitle of Sperber and Wilson’s work is, after all, Communication and Cognition. It seems, then, that when Vanhoozer cites with approval Steiner’s dictum that ‘God underwrites language’, he is really referring to what RT calls communication, rather than the narrower definition of language. Despite these reservations, Vanhoozer does claim that RT has a significant contribution to the task of biblical interpretation, although he does not develop this in any detail.78 It is RT’s claim that the recognition and function of speech acts is explained by the search for optimal relevance.

73 74

Thiselton, New Horizons, p. 2. Ibid., pp. 7, 539. See also his extended critiques (pp. 393–405 and 545–50 respectively) of such approaches, exemplified by Rorty and Fish. 75 See N. Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and the several Speech Act contributions in C. Bartholomew, C. Greene, and K. Möller (eds.), After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation (Scripture and Hermeneutics, 2; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). 76 K. Vanhoozer, ‘From Speech Acts to Scripture Acts: The Covenant of Discourse and the Discourse of the Covenant’, in Bartholomew et al., After Pentecost, pp. 1–49. 77 Vanhoozer, ‘From Speech Acts’, p. 2. 78 Ibid., pp. 10–14, 22, 26, 39–44.

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The People of God in the Apocalypse Relevance and translation

RT was introduced to the Bible translation community primarily by ErnstAugust Gutt, and it is in this community that the theory has first been brought to bear on biblical text in any detail.79 This has been a contested approach, and arguments both for and against continue in the literature.80 Space permits only a brief examination of Gutt’s thesis and some of the criticisms of it. Gutt’s appropriation of RT for translation is focussed on the concept of interpretive resemblance of thoughts and utterances, and the ‘guarantee of faithfulness’ which RT claims accompanies any utterance.81 Gutt’s focus on utterances, rather than underlying propositional forms, is constrained by the fact that not all real-language utterances have propositional form.82 ‘Interpretive resemblance’ becomes not only a theoretical notion but a criterion of faithfulness of translation (and, by implication, of interpretation). Gutt criticizes contemporary approaches to Bible translation as either focussed entirely on linguistically encoded information or as attempting to explicate and thus fix what are really indeterminate elements of the context.83 His test case is Matthew 2, as treated by R. T. France, who discusses the possibility of a text being deliberately composed with layers of 79 His lectures at the 1991 UBS Triennial Translation Workshop, E.-A. Gutt, Relevance Theory: A Guide to Successful Communication in Translation (Dallas: SIL, 1992), provide a relatively easy way into the discussion. For a fuller treatment see E.-A. Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Note also R. Blass, Relevance Relations in Discourse: A Study with Special Reference to Sissala (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 80 On the positive side see, for example, D. van Grootheest, ‘Relevance Theory and Bible Translation’ (Unpublished Doctoraalscriptie thesis, Amsterdam: Free University, 1996); K. Smith, ‘Translation Theory as Secondary Communication: The Relevance Theory Perspective of Ernst-August Gutt’, in J. A. Naudé and C. H. J. van der Merwe (eds.), Contemporary Translation Studies and Bible Translation: A South African Perspective (Acta Theologica 2000 Supplementum 2, Bloemfontain: University of the Free State, 2002), pp. 107–17; on the negative, E. Wendland, ‘A Review of “Relevance Theory” in Relation to Bible Translation in South-Central Africa’, Part 1, JNSL 22 (1996), pp. 91–106; Part 2, JNSL 23 (1997), pp. 83–108. For more references see Pattemore, Discourse Structure, pp. 29–30. 81 Gutt, Translation, pp. 34, 39–44. See Wilson and Sperber, ‘Representation and Relevance’, pp. 138–9. 82 See Gutt, Translation, p. 44: ‘two utterances, or even more generally, two ostensive stimuli, interpretively resemble one another to the extent that they share their explicatures and/or implicatures. This notion of interpretive resemblance is independent of whether or not the utterances in question have a propositional form, but at the same time it is contextdependent, since the explicatures and implicatures of the utterance are context-dependent.’ 83 His characterization of the approaches of, respectively, the United Bible Societies and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Gutt, Translation, pp. 66–9, 73.


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meaning, intended for different audiences with different presuppositions and backgrounds.84 This view of multiple intended meanings ‘is quite consistent with relevance theory’.85 Gutt considers translation as interlingual interpretive usage, a definition that allows for both indirect and direct translation (which correspond to indirect and direct quotation), depending on the requirements of the environment and audience. The most coherent critic of this approach has been Ernst Wendland, whose criticisms have as much to do with the validity of RT as an interpretive tool as with its application to translation.86 At their heart is his concern that Gutt’s claim that RT alone can explain the translation process does not do justice to the complexities of the task.87 Gutt’s approach is, by his own admission, reductionist, but only on a theoretical level, since if translation is a type of communication, then RT, as a communication theory, must explain it. This does not eliminate the need to wrestle with ‘problems of discernment, assessment, and choice’. Wendland finds problems with both sides of the RT equation, processing effort and contextual effects, as well as the concept of ‘context’ itself. His criticism of the cognitive environment definition of context as idiosyncratic has some point.88 But ‘context’ has been such an ill-defined concept in both linguistic and biblical studies that the more precise definition of RT is a major step forwards. It is only as the wider ‘context’ features as part of a person’s mental life that it affects their understanding of linguistic or other stimuli. Further, the fact that context in RT includes the contributions not only of text and co-text, but also of extra-linguistic context, makes it more comprehensive as well as being precise.89 84 Ibid., pp. 70–2; R. T. France, ‘The Formula-quotations of Matthew 2 and the Problem of Communication’, NTS 27 (1981), pp. 233–51. For a discussion of how RT explains this, see Pattemore, Discourse Structure, pp. 31–2. For the deliberate use of the technique of ‘concealment’ by later Gnostic teachers see J. L. Kovacs, ‘Divine Pedagogy and the Gnostic Teacher according to Clement of Alexandria’, JECS 9 (2001), pp. 17–25; R. D. Young, ‘Evagrius the Iconographer: Monastic Pedagogy in the Gnostikos’, JECS 9 (2001), pp. 58–61. 85 Gutt, Translation, p. 72. 86 As well as his ‘Review’, see also E. Wendland, ‘A Tale of Two Debtors: On the Interaction of Text, Co-text, and Context in a New Testament Dramatic Narrative (Luke 7:36–50)’, in D. A. Black (ed.), Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation (Nashville: Broadman, 1992), pp. 101–43; and ‘On the Relevance of “Relevance Theory” for Bible Translation’, BT 47 (1996), pp. 126–37. 87 Wendland, ‘Two Debtors’, pp. 136–41; Wendland, ‘Review’, Part 1, pp. 91–2, 98–9. 88 Wendland, ‘Review’, Part 1, pp. 95–6. 89 Wendland’s careful, multi-level analysis of Luke 7:36–50 (‘Two Debtors’) makes use of precisely the kind of complex but well-defined context that RT assumes – text, co-text, and context.

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Wendland is concerned that RT implies an ‘easy listening’ approach to all communication and ignores the case of ‘literarily competent individuals’ and texts designed for such readers; that to focus on ‘cognitive effects’ is to ignore intuitive and evocative effects (such as are achieved by poetry); and that RT’s reader-centred approach to understanding texts undermines the text’s ability to surprise and challenge the assumptions of the readers.90 However, these concerns significantly underestimate the subtlety with which RT explains how literary texts achieve their effects, and the ways in which cognitive effects create the conditions for the communication of values, feelings, and desires. Furthermore, as we have already seen, although RT works primarily from the point of view of the reader, it privileges the author’s intended communicative intentions.91 Wendland’s criticisms stem from a serious concern for faithfulness to the biblical message in the translation task. His suggestions for a broaderbased approach reflect the high degree of both scholarship and skill that he brings to the task.92 Nevertheless, I believe his criticism of RT and its importance for biblical interpretation and translation to be unwarranted. RT does not supplant semantic, syntactic, structural, or literary analysis. It both undergirds and guides them. And Gutt’s work is important for bringing it to bear on biblical text. Relevance, intertextuality, and the Apocalypse RT’s interests in the nature and importance of cognitive environments relates it closely to the study of intertextuality.93 At the broadest level, according to Jonathan Culler, intertextuality is ‘less a name for a work’s relation to prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture’.94 This is a perspective that RT would affirm. Every act of communication is understood against a background of cognitive environments which the interlocutors share by their participation in a 90 91

For these criticisms see, Wendland, ‘Review’, Part 1, pp. 94, 102–5. For a more detailed defence of RT in the face of these criticisms see my Discourse Structure, pp. 29–38. 92 Note also his comment in Wendland, ‘On the Relevance of Relevance Theory’, p. 134, ‘the RT approach is extremely useful for Bible translators to become familiar with – if modified, or perhaps rephrased . . . and carefully integrated within a more explicitly comprehensive text-context oriented, structure-functional methodology’ (italics in the original). As will be seen, this is precisely the role that I see RT taking within the process of exegesis. 93 For a more detailed treatment of this field of interaction see S. Pattemore, ‘Relevance Theory, Intertextuality, and the Book of Revelation’, in P. Noss (ed.), Current Trends in Scripture Translation (UBS Bulletin, 194/195, Reading: UBS, 2003), pp. 43–60. 94 J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 103.


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common culture, and which includes much more than the current discourse or any set of related discourses. But it is also necessary to say that not all parts of the ‘discursive space of a culture’ are equally accessible to the participants in a particular act of communication. RT requires that that space be evaluated in terms of concentric and intersecting spheres of accessibility (the ‘processing effort’ side of the equation) and productivity (the ‘cognitive effects’ side). Such an approach is responsible to the pragmatics of real communication, while yet leaving ample room for the allusive/elusive/illusive power of weak implicature. Nevertheless, with respect to a literary text in a literary culture, some degree of special consideration must be given to the relationship of the text in focus to already-existing literary texts. Richard Hays’ development from the earlier work of C. H. Dodd is largely consistent with the insights of RT.95 Drawing on the work of John Hollander, Hays describes the functioning of textual echoes in terms of a ‘diachronic trope’ which Hollander calls transumption or metalepsis: ‘When a literary echo links the text in which it occurs to an earlier text, the figurative effect of the echo can lie in the unstated or suppressed (transumed) points of resonance between the two texts.’96 This requires that the wider context of a quotation or allusion is formative for its interpretation in its new setting, or, as Hollander puts it, ‘the interpretation of a metalepsis entails the recovery of the transumed material’.97 The explicit point of contact between two texts can thus be a nexus for an implicit flow of meaning between texts.98 Hays claims that not only faint echoes but also explicit quotations often function by means of metalepsis, and that sensitivity to the wider context of the original setting of a quotation is thus a necessary hermeneutical strategy.99 There is no claim that the context is treated in a ‘historical-critical’ sense, but rather it is a field of suggestion and evocation of ideas. In this it is also strongly resonant with RT’s emphasis on the contribution of implicatures established within mutual cognitive environments to the meaning 95 R. B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); cf. C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Substructure of New Testament Theology (London: Collins, 1952). 96 Hays, Echoes, p. 20; see J. Hollander, The Figure of an Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 97 Hollander, The Figure of an Echo, p. 115. 98 It is not claimed that every quotation or allusion necessarily entails a large amount of transumed material. Metalepsis is, like other figures of speech, a deliberately and artistically used tool for the evocation of meaning. Again, as with other figures of speech, there will often be an asymmetry between its intended and received effects. 99 Hays, Echoes, p. 24.

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of communication, and in particular the treatment of poetic effects as achieving their effect through ‘a wide array of weak implicatures’.100 Hays places all intertextual allusion along a continuous spectrum, from direct quotation to weak allusion or echo, and, like Sperber and Wilson, affirms the indeterminacy of weak implicatures, where the reader must assume more responsibility for making the connection.101 Hays’ approach, then, is strongly supported by RT’s cognitive description of the communication process, particularly if we accept the suggestion of C. A. Evans that the field in which the original voices of the echoes are to be found must include ‘interpreted scripture’ and non-scriptural texts.102 The first five of Hays’ criteria for the validity of an echo – availability, volume, recurrence, thematic coherence, and historical plausibility – all relate to the RT criterion of the accessibility of a context in terms of processing effort, while the remaining two – history of interpretation and satisfaction – relate to the RT concept of contextual effects.103 But we are still talking here about what might be called textual spaces, or cognitive environments defined by other texts. RT asserts that anything, so long as it can be mentally represented, can contribute to the cognitive environment within which relevance is to be sought. As I have already observed, this is in line with the broadest definitions of intertextuality, where the potential field of reference is the whole ‘discursive space of a culture’. Two things need to be said in this regard. First, while affirming the dependence of all texts on a broad resonant space for their meaning, RT does not require the imposition of an ideologically driven destabilization of meaning, prevalent in some discussions of intertextuality.104 It is 100 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p. 222. See their whole section on poetic effects, pp. 217–24. 101 Hays, Echoes, p. 23. Hays explicitly acknowledges that texts give rise to meanings other than those intended by the author, or even those allowed by the later exegete: ‘texts can generate readings that transcend both the conscious intention of the author and all the hermeneutical strictures that we promulgate’ (Hays, Echoes, p. 33). See also Dodd, According to the Scriptures, p. 131, and compare Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, pp. 199– 200. 102 C. A. Evans, ‘Listening for Echoes of Interpreted Scripture’, in C. A. Evans and J. A. Sanders (eds.), Paul and the Scriptures of Israel (JSNTSup, 83; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 47–51. 103 Hays, Echoes, pp. 29–31. 104 Hays rightly rejects the criticism of Green that he works with a minimalist understanding of intertextuality, since he refuses to use it as an ideological tool. He has, as he points out, deliberately set aside the radical cynicism of Bloom, Kristeva, and Barthes for the more positive appreciation of the functioning of textual echoes in Hollander. See W. S. Green, ‘Doing the Text’s Work for it: Richard Hays on Paul’s Use of Scripture’, in Evans and Sanders, Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, pp. 59–63; R. B. Hays, ‘On the Rebound: A Response to Critiques of Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul’, in Evans and Sanders, Paul and the Scriptures of Israel, pp. 79–81.


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inherently constructive rather than deconstructive. Secondly, it may be that at precisely this point, RT can help to clarify the terminology. For if ‘intertextuality’ is taken to mean the influence of everything on a text, it ceases to be a useful term, and its core morpheme, /text/, is drained of all distinctive meaning or significance. If everything is ‘text’, then /text/ is nothing. In RT terms, I suggest then that ‘intertextuality’ be reserved for relevance found within textually defined cognitive environments, where a text is a (relatively stable) sequence of language. The remainder, the influence of lives and events, geography and culture, is relevance found within non-textually defined cognitive environments. The sum of the two is simply relevance. John’s Apocalypse is unique among NT documents in that, while it contains no explicit quotations from the Old Testament, its whole fabric is a closely woven tapestry of verbal allusion and evocation of both biblical and extra-biblical text.105 Beale has provided a useful review of several recent authors who attempt to describe Revelation’s relationship to earlier scriptures.106 Three of these are briefly evaluated here from a relevance perspective. Paulien’s insistence that the best way to understand the book is to put ourselves in the place of the original readers and ‘tune our ears to the meanings they would have taken for granted’ is consistent with the principles of relevance.107 But the distinction between echo and allusion, though valid in itself, depends for Paulien on the consciousness or intention of the author.108 Fekkes appeals even more explicitly to authorial intent in attempting to distinguish between an informal quotation and an allusion.109 While RT supports the place of the author’s intentions, and especially the assumption of intentionality, in the communication event, any attempt to make the distinction from our perspective by appeal to the author’s motivation begs the question of whether this is directly accessible to us at all, except through the text itself. And what difference it would 105 The secondary literature on the use of scripture and other writings in Revelation is immense. In addition to references listed in Chapter 1, nn. 15–17, see Swete, Apocalypse, pp. cxl–clviii; Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. lxii–lxxxvi; A. Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (HDR, 9; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976); Aune, ‘Intertextuality’; Jack, Text Reading Texts; Linton, ‘Reading the Apocalypse’; S. Moyise, ‘Intertextuality and the Book of Revelation’, ExpTim 104 (1993), pp. 295–8; J. Paulien, ‘The Book of Revelation and the Old Testament’, BR 43 (1998), pp. 61–9. 106 Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament, pp. 13–59. 107 Paulien, Decoding, pp. 5–6. 108 Ibid., pp. 172–3. 109 Fekkes, Isaiah, pp. 64–5. For Fekkes, a ‘formal’ quotation is one which is introduced as such in the text by at least a minimal formula. There do not appear to be any formal quotations in Revelation, hence the importance of informal quotations. His ‘allusion’ would appear to be close to Paulien’s ‘echo’.

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make if we could determine whether or not the author was conscious of the origin of his language. Does the absence of authorial consciousness really make the original context irrelevant, as Paulien appears to imply? On the other hand, Fekkes’ criteria for determining authorial motivation are largely centred on the text in its context, and are generally compatible with relevance considerations. Less defensible is his distinction between an informal quotation and an allusion, given the possible change in language between source and text, the existence of various textual traditions, and the possibility of extempore translation. In any case, how does it advance our understanding of a text if we distinguish between a quotation and an allusion? If an allusion is deliberate and recognizable, then it is equivalent to a quotation because it conveys communicative propositions like ‘I have taken this idea from the former text’ and ‘the former text has something to contribute to your understanding of my meaning’ as cognitive effects. Even a formal quotation may convey no more than this, in terms of communicative intents.110 Moyise was the first to apply Hays’ intertextual approach explicitly to Revelation.111 He develops this further in The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, where his particular interest is not so much which texts are echoed by which verses, but how John appropriates the older texts, to what extent he imitates, controls, or reinterprets them, whether or not he provides a definitive interpretation of them for the reader.112 But for Moyise, it is the text of the OT, rather than the social and geographical environment of the ‘seven churches’, which forms the primary context within which to understand the text of Revelation.113 From the perspective of RT, this is only partly true. Cognitive environments defined by prior texts must always be evaluated alongside those defined by local situations to determine which yields the most positive cognitive effects for the least processing effort.114 The priority claimed by Moyise of earlier texts over situational context cannot be taken for granted and must be evaluated in each instance.115 110 111 112

See Hays, Echoes, p. 24. Moyise, ‘Intertextuality and the Book of Revelation’. Moyise, The Old Testament, especially pp. 20–3 and ch. 6, ‘Revelation and Intertextuality’, pp. 108–38. 113 Ibid., p. 36. See further ch. 1, pp. 4–5 above, and pp. 54–7 below. 114 As Moyise, The Old Testament, p. 125, notes in another context, ‘As well as playing on the “evocative power” of texts, John may well be playing on the “evocative power” of shared experiences.’ 115 Bauckham, Climax, pp. x–xiii, emphasizes the fact that both prior text and situational context are important for understanding Revelation.


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How, then, does an author like John use prior texts? Does the original context determine use in the new context, or vice versa? Is there a useful distinction between a conscious allusion and an accidental echo? Relevance considerations would appear to offer a way out of these somewhat confusing dichotomies.116 RT would not attempt to prejudge the author’s intentionality by appeal to other criteria, but would seek to access it through an evaluation of how an audience might optimize the relevance of the text itself. First we concentrate on the audience’s perception. We assume that the OT and other prior texts are part of a mutual cognitive environment, forming a context which the author can presume she shares with her audience.117 Then we assume that the author has communicated with a view to optimizing relevance. Thus whether the relationship of a statement to a previous text is an ‘informal quotation’, an ‘allusion’, or an ‘echo’ is scarcely relevant. What is relevant is whether the author has made manifest only the assumptions expressed by the statement (its explicatures) and those implicatures entailed by the immediate context, or in addition, the assumption that she used a particular source for her language. This distinction is to be made on the criterion of optimizing relevance. In the former case, even if the audience perceive a source, any further implicatures taken from the source are entirely the audience’s responsibility. In the latter case, the audience may reasonably assume that the author wishes them to explore the source context for further implicatures. In the former case the source context could be said to be weakly open (or ‘ajar’); in the latter case it is strongly open (‘agape’).118 It would seem, then, that a more valid distinction, between what I shall call ‘contextual evocation’ and ‘conventional usage’, might be established using RT: 116 Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament, p. 28, tends to cloud the issue emotively when he speaks of ‘the vexed question of whether or not John uses the Old Testament contextually in line with the original meaning of Old Testament passages or whether he merely uses Old Testament wording, twisting and disregarding the original meaning to suit the new situation’ (my italics). This does not allow for the possibility that John’s use may be both responsible to the OT context and yet creative. 117 Bauckham, Climax, p. xi, goes much further than this when he says that the OT ‘forms a body of literature which John expects his readers to know and explicitly recall in detail while reading his own work’. This appears to read his own presuppositions back into the mind of John. His view that canonical scripture will be more important than non-canonical texts may well be correct (their status may mean that they are more readily evoked), but it is not a necessary starting assumption. 118 Thus even in the first case, further contextual implicatures drawn from the source context may contribute good contextual effects and increase relevance. But these are largely the audience’s responsibility and illustrate the asymmetric nature of the communication event.

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An OT (or other source) text is contextually evoked if the audience need to access the original context of the text, and add it to their cognitive environment, in order to optimize the relevance of the author’s statement in their contemporary context. An OT (or other source) text is used conventionally if the audience can optimize relevance within the mutual cognitive environment of author and audience, without access to the original context of the embedded text.119 But even this cannot be a bi-polar distinction. As we have already seen, RT requires that the two conditions described be seen as points on a continuum.120 Every use of an earlier text brings with it some context. The audience assume optimal relevance and search available contexts for ones that will provide this. If adequate contextual effects are obtained in a near context (for example first-century Christian practice and belief), then there is no need to open less accessible contexts (for example the book of a minor prophet, or an obscure text in 2 Chronicles). On the other hand, there may be clues in the text that further processing of the source context will be rewarded by additional contextual effects. These could include elements in the text that remain unexplained by the near context, or that require considerable effort to process without returning significant contextual effects. In any case, how much of the source context is explored is a continuously variable quantity, and is itself determined by the principle of relevance: just sufficient to optimize the relevance of the author’s usage.121 This way of looking at intertextual relationships does not eliminate all subjectivity, but it does go some way to reducing it because we are no longer trying to discriminate the same categories as before. Relevance Theory suggests a way of understanding intertextual allusion that respects 119 This is similar to Paulien’s ‘echo’. Note what he says (Paulien, Decoding, pp. 175–6): ‘In order to understand an “echo” as John did, we must go back to the origin of the idea(s), but without the assumption that John was consciously pointing to a particular background passage when he included the idea(s) in Revelation. Such a “live symbol” has become divorced from its original context . . . What matters is the basic meaning of the concept which had attained a fairly fixed content by New Testament times.’ See also the comments of A. Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 53–4. 120 See Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p. 23, and Hays, Echoes, pp. 199–200. 121 See D. Blakemore, Semantic Constraints on Relevance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 112, ‘the Principle of Relevance entitles the hearer to interpret every utterance in the smallest and most immediately accessible context to yield an adequate range of contextual effects’. This does not deny the possibility of extensive contextual reference built up by a network of allusions to the same passage, as suggested by Bauckham, Climax, p. xi. A second allusion is more readily perceived because the context has already been accessed. Contextual effects are able to multiply as more of the original context is evoked.


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the original context without making prior assumptions about the way it is being used. It gives access to the author’s probable intentions, not as though they can be directly read off the text, but by assuming that the author has communicated ostensively and that human communication is guided by the quest for optimal relevance.122 Finally, to make clear the limitation of RT used in this way, we should note that however likely and however satisfying we may find a particular echo or allusion, its discovery is almost always contingent on our also having access to the source of the echo. How many more examples of metalepsis are we missing simply because we do not know the texts they link to? The (diachronic) relevance we find when we read an ancient text for ourselves will be determined by our own cognitive environment, including our knowledge of other texts. But our investigation of the (synchronic) relevance found by the first readers will necessarily be limited by our ignorance of their cognitive environments.123

Relevance and the nature of John’s imagery The nature of the imagery in the Apocalypse is a vast subject deserving of its own special study. All I intend to do here is to offer a brief introduction to the potential contribution of a relevance approach to understanding the significance of the symbolism and imagery.124 Several commentators stress the view that Revelation’s symbolic language is not a sign language with a grammar of its own, or a code system transparent to those who possess the key, but rather a complex web of evocative pictorial images. Boring distinguishes between propositional language, which he describes as objectifying, logical, diachronic, using signs rather than symbols, and contrasting myth with truth, and pictorial language, which is non-objectifying, non-logical, non-inferential, 122 Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament, pp. 50–9, argues for the importance of the author’s intentions by appeal to Hirsch’s concept of the ‘willed type’. His discussion here is helpful and in many ways similar to the approach I have taken through RT. See especially his handling of the ‘implications’ of a statement, and the varying responsibility of author and audience in determining these, pp. 54–6. 123 Cf. Hollander, The Figure of an Echo, p. 65: ‘The readers of texts, in order to overhear echoes, must have some kind of access to an earlier voice, and to its cave of resonant signification, analogous to that of the author of the later text.’ 124 In particular I am not at this point entering the important contemporary debate about the ethical problems raised by the imagery (especially issues of violence and misogyny), although I suspect that a relevance approach may help us understand the motivation and intended function of this problematic language. See Barr, ‘Ethical Reading’, for a helpful response to some of the more critical commentators.

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synchronic, using tensive polyvalent symbols and myth as a vehicle for truth.125 In particular, Pictorial language can communicate the message expressed by a certain picture, vision, or symbol without affirming all the implications of the message if it were reduced to propositional language. Such pictorial language says what it says, not what it implies; it does not function as part of a larger inferential system.126 On the face of it this would appear to challenge the applicability of RT, focussing as it does on the inferential processes central to understanding. But while the truth of the first sentence above (the non-italicized one) can be acknowledged, the second is much more problematical and does not follow – at least not in any literal understanding of it. When John says ‘Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain’ (Rev. 20:1), the most important point he is communicating is not that he saw an angel with a key and a chain, nor is it that an angel came down from heaven, holding a key and chain. The language patently does not ‘say what it says’ and must on any valid system of interpretation be the starting point of an inferential process. If Boring’s point is that it is not to be rigidly linked into an over-arching system of interpretation which would identify the key and the chain, locate the pit, and timetable the angel’s descent, then it is well made.127 But this does not deny the essential inferential nature of the imagery. And it is precisely this process of inference which is open to investigation using Relevance Theory. It should also be remembered that there is no sharp or definable boundary between strong implicatures guaranteed by the author and weak implicatures for which the audience must take responsibility.128 Thus the same process of searching for optimal relevance, based on the same text, can lead to potentially very different 125 Boring, Revelation, pp. 51–9. See also Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, Revelation, p. 20; Bauckham, Theology, pp. 17–22. ‘Tensive’ symbols are described in n. 130 below. 126 Boring, Revelation, p. 57 (my italics). 127 A. Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949), p. 18, would argue that the images do constitute an interconnected and self-consistent world. Though he is more often noted for his structural approach to Revelation (see comments by R. H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 45–6; Aune, Revelation 1–5, p. xciv), Farrer’s appreciation of the function of the imagery is subtle and in some aspects anticipates the insights of Relevance Theory (see, for example, pp. 13–20). Nevertheless, he treats the book essentially from a compositional rather than a receptor-centred perspective and can fairly be criticized for the complexity of the resulting structures. 128 See p. 19 above and references there.


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readings of the same picture or image. For this reason a relevance-based investigation must begin by defining the cognitive environments within which the imagery occurs, starting from the immediate textual location, properly delimited by discourse analysis.129 The further consequence of a relevance approach is that Boring’s dichotomy between propositional and pictorial language is at best overstated. Even the apparently propositional opening words of Revelation are potentially tensive.130 And similarly, not only symbolic or pictorial language, but all language used in communication is the starting point for an inferential process seeking optimal relevance. Sperber in his earlier work on symbolism agrees that symbolism is not a code or grammar. At the same time he strongly argues that symbolic thought is not pre-rational but that symbolic processing takes place when rational processing fails adequately to interpret a proposition.131 This implies that the student of Revelation is spared from making any a priori decisions about which statements are symbolic and which are not. All propositions are considered as inputs to the rational processing of the audience, and the search for symbolic meaning begins where rational analysis fails.132 But RT’s insistence on the most accessible meaning yielding 129 Compare the comments on the reuse of metaphor in biblical literature by J. M. Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 158: ‘to explain what it means to Christians to say that God is a fountain of living water, or a vine-keeper, or a rock, or fortress, or king requires an account not merely of fountains, rocks, vines, and kings but of a whole tradition of experiences and of the literary tradition which records and interprets them’. RT, however, takes the further step of explaining how such context is limited by relevance, as the next paragraph shows. For an RT approach to metaphor and metonymy see N. S. Song, ‘Metaphor and Metonymy’, in Carston and Uchida, Relevance Theory, pp. 87–104. 130 The phrase , Rev. 1:1a, potentially evokes several concepts in a Christian context: that of a prophetic revelation in the context of worship (cf. 1 Cor. 14:26–32), that of the Parousia (cf. 1 Cor. 1:7; 2 Thess. 1:7; 1 Pet. 1:7, 13), and that of a message from Christ (cf. Gal. 1:12). It seems unnecessary to decide between these connotations. Boring’s concept of ‘tensive symbols’, Revelation, pp. 54–5, is a development from P. Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), who distinguished between steno symbols, which have a clearly defined, objective referent, and what he termed ‘expressive’ or ‘depth’ symbols, which carry a range of overtones of meaning, and by doing so set up a tension in the mind of the reader. The latter are Boring’s ‘tensive’ symbols. 131 D. Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); D. Sperber, ‘Is Symbolic Thought Prerational?’, in M. L. Foster and S. H. Brandes (eds.), Symbol as Sense (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 25–44; D. Sperber, ‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’ in On Anthropological Knowledge, ET (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 35–63. 132 Note that this distinction between rational and symbolic processing is not the same as that between literal and non-literal meanings, since most of the latter are just as rationally processed as the former.

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adequate contextual effects also places a limit on the extent of inferential processing.133 This limit is a safeguard against attempts to integrate all images into the kind of over-arching, logical construct that Boring rejects. 2.5

A Relevance-Theoretic approach to the Apocalypse The relevance perspective in the study of biblical text

This chapter has attempted to establish ways in which the criterion of ‘optimal relevance’ might contribute to the interpretation of biblical texts, including their intertextual allusions and their use of imagery. As an explanatory paradigm for the cognitive processes of human communication, RT offers potential insights into the way audiences would have interacted with the texts. This has implications for text criticism, discourse structure, genre, and (original) reader response. The pivotal question that has to be faced in advocating the use of RT is not ‘Does it give results?’ but ‘Is it necessary?’ The heart of Wendland’s criticism of Gutt was that ‘the theoretical framework and terminology of RT is superfluous. It does not really contribute anything to his competent exposition of the biblical text.’134 If the only contribution RT made to understanding the text was the introduction of new jargon, then Wendland would be right.135 However, even our preliminary investigations thus far suggest that this is not the case. Further, we should note that Gutt attempted to show that RT is the only theoretical framework necessary for an understanding of translation.136 In relation to the analysis of biblical text (of which, as Gutt rightly holds, translation is a special case) I prefer to see RT, and the insights it offers into the process of human cognition, as a valuable tool for use alongside others. It does not replace (nor is it the sole criterion within) the traditional and emerging disciplines of textual criticism, historical-critical analysis, discourse analysis, historicalsociological analysis, and rhetorical criticism. Rather it provides a valid 133 D. Wilson, ‘Relevance and Understanding’, in G. Brown, K. Malmkjaer, A. Pollitt, and J. Williams (eds.), Language and Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 43, comments: ‘it is clear that in interpreting . . . we do not assume that the speaker intended us to go on expanding the context indefinitely, deriving ever more implications. We do look for some implications, of course; but what we appear to do is choose the minimal set of implications that would make the utterance worth listening to, and stop there.’ 134 Wendland, ‘Review’, Part 2, p. 93. 135 Here it is worth noting the helpful ‘Glossary of Terms as Used within Relevance Theory’, in Carston and Uchida, Relevance Theory, pp. 295–9. 136 Gutt, Translation, p. 188.


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perspective for any of these disciplines, a perspective with several important strengths.137 First, it involves treating the text as the record of a real communication event and, as a consequence, emphasizes the importance of context for understanding. This respect for the text and for the life situation giving rise to it is a welcome change from some of the decontextualizing methodologies prevalent in post-modern criticism.138 At the same time what I have called a ‘relevance perspective’ avoids the ‘intentional fallacy’ and sidelines questions of literary dependence, by focussing attention primarily on how the text would be understood by the reader. Thus it gives a cognitive theoretical justification to the processes of historical-critical research.139 Secondly, RT gives a more precise definition to the notion of context, or to such a notion of context as is significant for understanding an utterance. Avoiding both the vagueness which usually accompanies the discussion of context, and the indefinability of the idea of ‘mutual knowledge’, the RT concept of ‘mutual cognitive environments’ allows fairly explicit descriptions of such contexts to guide analysis, even if all the details of the wider socio-cultural environment are not known. 137 Wendland, ‘Review’, Part 2, pp. 95–106, proposes a similarly multi-disciplinary approach to translation. In my judgment he underestimates the degree to which questions of relevance influence other aspects of his construct, such as discourse analysis, style, and poetics. 138 The de-historicizing of texts like Revelation, leading to modern political, social, and ideological agendas being imposed on them, is evidenced in, for example, Moore, ‘Beatific Vision’, or Pippin, ‘Eros and the End’, or T. Pippin, ‘Jezebel Re-Vamped’, Semeia 69/70 (1995), pp. 221–33. It is not that the concerns raised in these and similar works are invalid, but that the text and context are afforded little respect in themselves. RT appears to offer a mechanism by which the social context of the text can be taken seriously, in line with Friesen’s call (‘Revelation, Realia, and Religion’, p. 307): ‘to be more systematic in treating literary texts like Revelation as social productions related to their historical, political, and religious contexts’. 139 It should be clear that RT’s contribution is not the assertion of the importance of the original audience’s understanding for the meaning of a text, but rather its explanatory and theoretical underpinning. The following quotation from J. L. Martyn, The Gospel of John in Christian History: Essays for Interpreters (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 105–6, n. 169, illustrates the pedigree of a perspective entirely consonant with RT: ‘a hermeneutical rule attributed orally by E. Käsemann to W. Bauer is of crucial importance: Before one inquires into the author’s intention, he must ask how the first readers are likely to have understood the text . . . The author of that verse took no steps to exclude this obvious interpretation. It follows that he probably intended it.’ In the field of secular historical research, Skinner criticizes what he calls ‘contextual methodology’ not for its interest in the original context, but for the way context is used. Again he anticipates an RT perspective when he says: ‘The “context” mistakenly gets treated as the determinant of what is said. It needs rather to be treated as an ultimate framework for helping decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate’ (Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, p. 64).

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Thirdly, RT’s central thesis of the trade-off between processing effort and contextual effects can be used to prioritize cognitive environments and thus becomes a criterion for analysing text (using any of the disciplines) from the readers’/hearers’ perspective and adjudicating between competing co-texts and contexts. The use of RT is not necessary for the understanding of biblical text, in the same sense that an understanding of the laws of gravity is not necessary to live successfully in a gravitational field. Gravity operates regardless of one’s cognitive attitude towards it.140 But an awareness of the way in which gravity works is important in the descriptive, explanatory, and predictive aspects of the work of the scientist and the engineer. Similarly, an awareness of RT offers descriptive, explanatory, and predictive insight into what guides the search for meaning. Towards a relevance-sensitive methodology In order to employ RT in this study with a degree of rigour, a number of steps appear to be necessary, in a logical (though not legalistic) order. 1

Establishment of the text

Clearly, to understand any communication it is important to establish exactly what was said. However, for reasons of space and because I wish to concentrate on the semantics and pragmatics of the text, I shall not engage in major, systematic textual criticism. Instead, textual issues will be dealt with as they arise and to the extent that they have potential to influence decision-making. 2

Elucidation of discourse structure

Although the text as a whole is of primary importance as a context for any particular sub-text, I have already stated above that not all parts of the text are equally accessible. Apart from the inherent priority of earlier text, it is also important to note that an extended text like the book of Revelation has an internal structure which relates certain text sequences (or sub-texts) to others in a variety of syntagmatic and hierarchical relationships. These sequences may pass information to each other regarding 140 Cf. Wilson and Sperber, ‘Representation and Relevance’, p. 140: ‘The principle of relevance . . . is not something that people have to know, let alone learn, in order to communicate effectively; it is not something that they obey or might disobey: it is an exceptionless generalisation about human communicative behaviour.’


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participants, time, spatial location, and events. Thus a comprehensive linguistic discourse analysis is a necessary preliminary to using relevance criteria in interpretation because it helps to determine within the whole co-text which text sequences are the most accessible. It is important to have textual units clearly delimited and issues of topic, focus, pronominal reference, and the like as clearly explicated as possible. 3

Identification of the issue

Cognitive environments are not, like some vaguer ideas of context, a fixed set of ideas which can be described once for a given text. Instead, each statement, and sometimes each word, opens doors into its own set of interlinked matrices of manifest assumptions. It is important therefore to identify clearly what it is one is investigating in a particular passage, before attempting to define the contexts within which it is interpreted. 4

Description of cognitive environments

This involves determining which environments are activated by the issue in question and describing them as fully as necessary. Such environments include the immediate co-text, the wider textual setting, the socio-cultural and historical setting, and the many layers of intertextual usage involved in the life, scripture, and liturgy of the audience. The cognitive environment, however, is not a fixed construct, determined in advance, but is actively and progressively created as the text is processed. Therefore the most useful method of studying the way in which an audience would have understood a passage is to allow the passage itself to unfold in a linear fashion, and to try to determine at each stage what cognitive environments are likely to have been accessed in the search for optimal relevance. 5

Evaluation of the accessibility of cognitive environments

The ‘processing effort’ side of the relevance equation, which determines the way an audience will interpret a text, depends on determining, at least to a comparative degree, how easily accessible the various cognitive environments are, and which ones yield the best cognitive effect for the least processing effort. Although this step comes logically after step 4 and before step 6, in practice there may be a degree of feedback and interaction between the three steps. Not all possible environments need to be described on every occasion in order to decide which is most easily

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accessible, and possible interpretations may be already on the horizon before the contexts are fully delineated. 6

Interpretation of text within prioritized contexts

Here is where the ‘cost-benefit’ analysis of RT comes into play, as an attempt is made to determine the likely interpretation of the text which provides the audience with good contextual effects for minimal processing effort. This does not mean, especially for a book like Revelation, that interpretation involving the absolute minimum of processing effort is the correct one, or even the one decided on by the audience. There may be significant co-textual and contextual markers to indicate that such a meaning is not an ‘adequate contextual effect’ and that the search must continue. Nevertheless, RT suggests that optimal relevance is the important criterion and that the search will be guided along these lines, with the corollary that it will not proceed beyond the point where optimal relevance is obtained. As I have already pointed out, this limits the extent to which the interpreter can validly search for cryptic meaning. But it does still allow the possibility of deliberate ‘double-coding’, if the text is so constructed as to yield one meaning to someone with one set of presuppositions and another to one with a different set.

RT is not a stand-alone approach to the biblical text, and the foregoing schema is intended to operate both as a fine-tuner and as a discriminating tool in the discipline of biblical exegesis through textual, discourse, historical-critical, rhetorical, and literary analysis. Chapter 3 will describe the context of the text in two ways. First, the text will be located in an assumed historical, cultural, and textual environment. Secondly, the results of a relevance-guided analysis of the discourse structure of the entire book will be summarized, with the particular purpose of identifying where and how the people of God are displayed within the hierarchically linked units of text. This will identify the focal passages for the exegetical work of Chapters 4–6, and provide a structured view of the co-text within which these passages are set, in order to facilitate the application of the criterion of relevance.

3 A C O G N I T I V E E N V I RO N M E N T F O R T H E A P O C A LY P S E

3.1

Introduction

A Relevance-Theoretic approach to understanding the Apocalypse locates meaning not within the text alone, but in the interaction of the text with the context of the reader/hearer in order to optimize relevance. If we are to follow the interpretive steps of the first readers, then, we shall need to know as much as possible about the cognitive environment within which they received the text. But we shall also need to understand how the structure of text provided for any given passage a text-internal context, and a series of natural connections to other passages. These two dimensions of context, the external and the internal, are the focus of this chapter and will be treated in quite different ways. First we shall state the assumptions we make about the text-external context, and then we shall report the results of a relevance-guided study of the discourse structure of the book. 3.2

The text in its context

Relevance Theory insists that context is not a fixed, predetermined construct, but is created progressively as the communication proceeds. Nevertheless, it is necessary to make some initial assumptions about the location of the text in social and historical terms, assumptions which can then be drawn on as possible elements of the mutual cognitive environment for a given passage. I shall state, then, as concisely as possible the background assumed for the text of Revelation, and elaborate briefly on a number of significant points.1 The book of Revelation is the record of a communication from a prominent individual, John, intended to be read aloud to gatherings 1 The inspiration for this form of statement comes from Boring’s ‘Introduction’, Revelation, pp. 1–62.

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The People of God in the Apocalypse of mixed Jewish–Gentile Christian communities in Asia Minor in the last decade of the first century AD. The beliefs and loyalties of these communities brought them into conflict, both potential and real, with other religious and governmental groups. The book was positively received and accorded a status which led to its preservation and eventual inclusion in the canon of the NT. The book of Revelation . . .

We assume, as a starting hypothesis, that the text printed in NA27/UBS4 reflects the original text. This assumption may be challenged in particular cases where considerations suggest not only that an alternative reading is in accord with the principle of relevance in the original situation, but that changes from the suggested reading to other readings would have created optimal relevance in their settings.2 . . . is the record of a communication . . . It is just possible that the book we have is not the record of an actual communication but an artifice, crafted to give the appearance of a real communication. It could also be an edited version of a communication or communications. This assumption thus explicitly posits that behind this text are an author and an audience who share a mutual cognitive environment, and the text was intended as optimally relevant communication within that environment. This assumption holds good even if the author composed his work from previous works. It also implies that the complete text of Revelation itself is perhaps the most important context within which any part of the text is to be understood. . . . from a prominent individual, John, . . . The implied author calls himself John, and the nature of his communication suggests that he writes from a position of leadership with respect to the people to whom he writes. Whether the author is John the apostle, the elder, the Baptist, or some other John, might in theory affect the mutual cognitive environment he shares with the audience and hence the audience’s interpretation of the text. But most commentators consider that 2 The most detailed treatment of textual questions is in H. C. Hoskier, Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse (2 vols.; London: Bernard Quaritch, 1929). For more recent discussions see Aune, Revelation 1–5, pp. cxxxiv–clx; Beale, Revelation, pp. 70–5.

A cognitive environment for the Apocalypse

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John’s social identity is more important. He is usually considered to be a prophet of some standing among the communities to which he writes.3 Whether his authority was universally acknowledged is less certain, and does not need to be specified. I shall consistently refer to the author as John, but shall make no a priori assumptions about his identity, allowing the text to force the issue if necessary. . . . intended to be read aloud to gatherings . . . This is not so much an assumption as a deduction from the text itself (Rev. 1:3), together with assumptions about the dynamics of writing and reading in the ancient world.4 Yet it has important implications for the way in which context is constructed. All text is linear, with succeeding sentences entering an environment formed by all the earlier ones.5 This priority of preceding context is even more prominent for text which is heard rather than read. It implies that for the hearers, the most accessible context of a sub-text is the immediately preceding text/sub-text. Other earlier text segments may be accessed, where the discourse structure or the participants or the narrative sequence require it to optimize relevance. Subsequent text may also exercise an influence in two related but distinct ways – retrospectively and recursively. Given the human capacity for memory, a subsequent passage may provide the missing component of the cognitive environment of an earlier passage, confirming or overturning any hypotheses which have been held and allowing the earlier 3 For discussions of authorship, generally adopting the view that John is an otherwise unknown prophet, see Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. xxxviii–l; Aune, Revelation 1–5, pp. xlvii–lvi; Beale, Revelation, pp. 34–6; J. Sweet, Revelation (SCM Pelican Commentaries; London: SCM, 1979), pp. 35–44; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 25–53; D. E. Aune, ‘The Social Matrix of the Apocalypse of John’, BR 26 (1981), pp. 16–32. The suggestion of J. M. Ford, The Revelation of John (AB, 38; New York: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 28–40, 50–6, that a prophecy by John the Baptist was supplemented by one of his disciples and only later edited as a Christian document has not received support. For a recent defence of apostolic authorship see Smalley, Thunder and Love, pp. 37–40. 4 For the importance of the oral/aural dimension of the book see Bauckham, Climax, p. 3; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, p. 144; and especially Barr, ‘Oral Enactment’, p. 243; Garrow, Revelation, pp. 3–4. For a comparison of John’s book with letter writing in the ancient world see Karrer, Die Johannesoffenbarung als Brief, pp. 49–83. 5 See Blakemore, Semantic Constraints, p. 112. Two authors who take this constraint on context seriously for Revelation are Garrow, Revelation, pp. 3–4; and J. W. Mealy, After the Thousand Years: Resurrection and Judgment in Revelation 20 (JSNTSup, 70; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992), pp. 59–60. Garrow makes the further interesting suggestion that the book was designed for serialized reading, with several points of suspense as likely breaks. This, however, works under the assumption that the whole could not have been read in one sitting, an assumption which may hold true for present-day Western congregations, but is not necessarily true in other cultural contexts.

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passage to achieve optimal relevance as the reading proceeds. But a written document is also usually reread, probably many times, and so later passages can provide part of a wider circle of context within which an earlier passage is read or heard. We do not know the precise context of the gatherings during which the text would have been read. A number of writers detect the influence of early Christian liturgy at several points, and it is possible that the reading took place within the eucharistic worship of the churches. If this was the case, it would certainly be an important component of the cognitive environment.6 . . . of mixed Jewish–Gentile Christian communities . . . This assumption defines one major horizon of the mutual cognitive environment, with a large number of contributing components. If they are Christian communities, then they are defined by a common faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel, as Saviour and Lord, and in the events of his death and resurrection as the climax of God’s purpose of salvation for humanity. We do not need to assume that the audience possessed any of the gospels as such. It is sufficient that they were familiar with some traditions that lie behind them, and in particular the idea of the return of Christ to consummate the age, and the specific traditions often referred to as the Synoptic Apocalypse.7 The relationship of the text and the community that produced it to the other Johannine writings has long been an issue.8 But Paul and his followers were also active in founding mixed 6 The cultic context for the reading of the Apocalypse was suggested by L. Thompson, ‘Cult and Eschatology in the Apocalypse of John’, JR 49 (1969), pp. 343–4. For further references see Chapter 1, p. 5, n. 17 above. In addition, note Barr, ‘Oral Enactment’, pp. 253–5; Garrow, Revelation, pp. 3–4. 7 On the relationship of the Apocalypse to the gospels and other NT books see the works listed in Chapter 1, p. 5, n. 17. L. Hartman, Prophecy Interpreted: The Formation of Some Jewish Apocalyptic Texts and of the Eschatological Discourse, Mark 13 Par., trans. Neil Tomkinson (ConBNT, 1; Lund: Gleerup, 1966), pp. 145–77, gave a description of the tradition history of the Synoptic Apocalypse (Matt. 24:3–44; Mark 13:3–37; Luke 17:22– 37; 21:7–36). Valuable discussions of its relationship to John’s Apocalypse can be found in Vos, Synoptic Traditions; Beale, ‘Use of Daniel’; E. Corsini, The Apocalypse: The Perennial Revelation of Jesus Christ, trans. Francis J. Moloney (GNS, 5; Dublin: Veritas, 1983), pp. 50–9. Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxvi, suggested that John may have used a number of NT books, including Matthew, Luke, and a number of Pauline epistles. Sweet, Revelation, pp. 40–1, also discusses this question, including the question of relationship to Paul’s writing. 8 In addition to references in n. 17, p. 5 above, see Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. xxix–xxxvii; Aune, Revelation 1–5, pp. liv–lvi; Smalley, Thunder and Love, pp. 57–69; S. S. Smalley, ‘John’s Revelation and John’s Community’, BJRL 69 (1987), pp. 549–71;


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Jewish–Gentile churches in the Asia Minor region, including two of the cities whose churches are addressed by John.9 Paul communicated with his churches by letter, and those in Ephesus and Laodicea may both have received letters from him.10 We simply do not know whether the churches to which John writes his prophetic letter were genetically or generically related to these Pauline churches or to any supposed Johannine communities, and, as with the authorship question, it is not necessary to make a priori assumptions. Where the text requires it, the points of contact will be noted as part of the potential environment. I shall not assume, for example, that the audience possessed copies of Pauline letters, or of the gospel or letters associated with the name of John.11 What is reasonably certain is that first-century Christian communities would have been familiar with the Old Testament, and in mixed Jewish–Gentile groups both the Hebrew text and its Greek translations were probably accessible.12 In addition we may assume that the mutual cognitive environment included post-OT Jewish writings and commentaries, including some of E. Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘The Quest for the Johannine School: The Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel’, NTS 23 (1977), pp. 402–27. On the influence of John’s Apocalypse on later apocalypses, some attributed to John, see J. M. Court, The Book of Revelation and the Johannine Apocalyptic Tradition (JSNTSup, 190; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). 9 Ephesus (see Acts 19; 20:17–38) and Laodicea (see Col. 4:15–16), presumably established during the time of ministry described in Acts 19:10. See Thompson, Apocalypse and Empire, pp. 117–27, 133–45, for a thorough discussion of the origins of Christianity in Asia Minor, the relationship between Jewish and Christian communities, and the likely mixed ethnicity of the churches. Internal evidence from the text will be seen to support this assumption. 10 Whether Ephesians was written to Ephesus is, of course, disputed. Whatever the case, it is intriguing to note that there are a number of images of the church in common (on a semantic rather than lexical level) between Ephesians and Revelation – as a temple, as an edifice built on the foundation of the apostles, as the bride of Christ, and as an army. See also the points of contact listed by Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. lxxxiii–lxxxvi. But there are major differences between the respective theological outlooks of Paul and John, especially with regard to the relationship of Christians to the non-Christian world. See W. A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 182; and P. Trebilco, ‘The Early Christians and the World Out There: Reflections on Revelation and the Pastoral Epistles’, Paper presented at the ANZABS Annual Conference, Auckland, 1998. 11 So Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, ‘Johannine School’, pp. 425–6, ‘The author of the Apoc is rooted in an early Christian prophetic-apocalyptic school but he also has access to Johannine as well as Pauline traditions. We have therefore to assume that at the end of the first century in Asia Minor various Christian circles or schools lived side by side within the Christian community, without being necessarily rival Christian groups or separate institutions.’ 12 On John’s use of the Old Testament see above, pp. 37–43. Few scholars follow the suggestion of Swete, Apocalypse, pp. clv–clvi, that John primarily relied on the LXX. Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. lxv–lxxxiii, argues that John’s main source is the Hebrew, a position supported by L. P. Trudinger, ‘Some Observations Concerning the Text of the Old Testament in the Book of Revelation’, JTS 17 (1966), pp. 83–8; and S. Thompson, The

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those which we label ‘pseudepigraphal’ and ‘apocalyptic’ and, perhaps, traditions which eventuated in later rabbinic writings and targums.13 The relationship to sectarian Judaism as expressed at Qumran is perhaps less certain, but will be noted where appropriate.14 With any of the material discussed in this section, the question posed by an RT approach is not simply ‘Did this tradition exist at the time when John wrote?’, but ‘Does it form part of the mutual cognitive environment which John assumes?’ Apocalypse and Semitic Syntax (SNTSMS, 52; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–2, 102–8. But Beale has made a strong case for the importance of both textual traditions. See G. K. Beale, ‘A Reconsideration of the Text of Daniel in the Apocalypse’, Bib 67 (1986), pp. 539–43; Beale, Revelation, pp. 77–9; Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament, p. 62. So also Moyise, The Old Testament, p. 17; S. Moyise, ‘The Language of the Old Testament in the Apocalypse’, JSNT 76 (1999), pp. 97–113; Paulien, ‘The Book of Revelation and the Old Testament’. On the related question of whether John himself was more at home in Greek or in a Semitic language see A. Lancellotti, Sintassi ebraica nel Greco dell’Apocalisse, vol. I, Uso delle forme verbali (Collectio Assisiensis; Assisi: Studio Teologico ‘Porziuncola’, 1964), p. 122; C. G. Ozanne, ‘The Language of the Apocalypse’, TynB 16 (1965), pp. 3–9, who argues that John’s style is deliberately modelled on the Hebrew Bible; Thompson, Semitic Syntax, pp. 106–8; A. D. Callahan, ‘The Language of the Apocalypse’, HTR 88 (1995), pp. 462–3. How familiar John’s audience was with the Hebrew scriptures is less certain. Trebilco, Jewish Communities, pp. 41, 44, 208 (n. 23), 221 (n. 119), records some Hebrew inscriptions in the area, though they are rare. 13 Which of these Jewish sources were available to John and his readers will be considered as the case arises. In addition to the literature listed in bibliographic notes to Chapter 1 (pp. 4–6) see C. van der Waal, ‘The Last Book of the Bible and the Jewish Apocalypses’, Neot 12 (1981), pp. 111–32; J. H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament: Prolegomena for the Study of Christian Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially p. 87; Sweet, Revelation, pp. 28–31; R. Bauckham, ‘Resurrection as Giving Back the Dead: A Traditional Image of Resurrection in the Pseudepigrapha and the Apocalypse of John’, in J. H. Charlesworth and C. A. Evans (eds.), The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation (JSPSup, 14, Studies in Early Judaism and Christianity, 2; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 269–91; D. Frankfurter, ‘The Legacy of Jewish Apocalypses in Early Christianity: Regional Trajectories’, in VanderKam and Adler, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage, pp. 129–200. On the relationship of the NT to the targums and other rabbinic literature, and the caution needed in assuming the latter as background, see S. A. Kaufman, ‘Dating the Language of the Palestinian Targums and their Use in the Study of First Century CE Texts’, in D. R. G. Beattie and M. J. McNamara (eds.), The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context (JSOTSup, 166; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), pp. 118–41; J. Neusner, Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament: What we Cannot Show, we do not Know (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994); M. Wilcox, ‘The Aramaic Background of the New Testament’, in Beattie and McNamara, The Aramaic Bible, pp. 362–78; B. Chilton, ‘Reference to the Targumim in the Exegesis of the New Testament’, in E. H. Lovering Jr (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1995 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), pp. 77–81. 14 On Qumran, in addition to works noted in Chapter 1, p. 5, n. 16, see O. Betz, ‘The Eschatological Interpretation of the Sinai-tradition in Qumran and in the New Testament’, RevQ 6 (1967), pp. 89–107; J. M. Baumgarten, ‘The Duodecimal Courts of Qumran, Revelation, and the Sanhedrin’, JBL 95 (1976), pp. 59–78. For the suggestion that Revelation opposes a form of political messianism, whether from within Palestine or from the Diaspora, see R. van de Water, ‘Reconsidering the Beast from the Sea (Rev. 13.1)’, NTS 46 (2000), pp. 245–61.


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This question is at once more stringent and more tractable. As a general principle we shall not build interpretations solely on materials which we cannot be sure were available to John and his audience. But if a significant increase in relevance would result from assuming that John expected his audience to be familiar with, for example, a tradition which manifests in a later targumic text, or a Qumranic interpretation, we shall take this into account. . . . in Asia Minor in the last decade of the first century AD . . . This assumption of the external context forms the other major horizon of the communicative world. I assume that the social, political, cultural, and economic conditions of the period (probably the later years of the reign of Domitian) contribute to the ‘cognitive geography’ shared by author and audience.15 This includes the external political supremacy of the Roman Empire, the Greco-Roman cultural environment, and the socio-religious worlds of ancient Greek and Roman religion, of local cults and of the emperor cult.16 Intersecting with these influences is the economic and 15 Most writers believe that the date must be between the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the turn of the century, and that other considerations give insufficient cause to dispute Irenaeus’ evidence for AD 95–6. See Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. xci–xcvii; Aune, Revelation 1–5, pp. lvii–lxx; Beale, Revelation, pp. 3–27; Sweet, Revelation, pp. 21–7; Slater, Christ and Community, pp. 22–6; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 54– 83; D. A. deSilva, ‘The Social Setting of the Revelation to John: Conflicts Within, Fears Without’, WTJ 54 (1992), pp. 273–81. Opting for an earlier date are Garrow, Revelation, pp. 66–79, AD 80; Ford, Revelation, pp. 4–11, 12–22, whose view that the book originates with the Baptist requires at least sections of it to predate the rest of the NT (p. 37); J. A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1976), pp. 221–53, AD 68– 70; A. A. Bell, ‘The Date of John’s Apocalypse. The Evidence of Some Roman Historians Reconsidered’, NTS 25 (1978), pp. 93–102, AD 68–9; R. B. Moberly, ‘When was Revelation Conceived?’, Bib 73 (1992), pp. 376–93, who places the original visions in AD 69, although suggesting that the letters to the churches may be from Trajan’s reign; R. A. Briggs, Jewish Temple Imagery in the Book of Revelation (Studies in Biblical Literature; New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 23–39, whose extensive discussion leads him to the late 60s; C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), p. 266, before AD 70; and J. C. Wilson, ‘The Problem of the Domitianic Date of Revelation’, NTS 39 (1993), pp. 587–605, who argues for a date in the mid to late 60s. For a tentative suggestion of a Trajanic date, on the grounds that Pliny appears to have been unable to quote any recent precedents in dealing with Christians, see F. G. Downing, ‘Pliny’s Prosecutions of Christians: Revelation and 1 Peter’, JSNT 34 (1988), pp. 105–23. 16 In addition to works noted in Chapter 1, p. 4, n. 14, see Sweet, Revelation, pp. 31–4; Slater, Christ and Community, pp. 18–22, 42–6; Boring, Revelation, pp. 8–23; J. Stambaugh and D. Balch, The Social World of the First Christians (London: SPCK, 1986); P. Coutsompos, ‘The Social Implication of Idolatry in Revelation 2:14: Christ or Caesar?’, BTB 27 (1997), pp. 23–7; A. Brent, ‘John as Theologos: The Imperial Mysteries and the Apocalypse’, JSNT 75 (1999), pp. 87–102; W. A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), pp. 19–63.

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commercial world, the influence of Rome on global trade patterns, and local influence of trade guilds.17 All of these, in a general sense, form part of the total mutual cognitive environment. On the other hand, I shall not assume specific local details concerning the cities mentioned in Revelation 1–3, unless these appear necessary.18 . . . conflict, both potential and real . . . The nature of Christian commitment on the one hand, and of the socioreligious environment on the other, made some degree of confrontation inevitable. There is general agreement that in the period when the book was most likely written there was no general state-sponsored persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire.19 So the strong presumption of conflict with the authorities which is found in the visions can be explained by one of two scenarios. It is seen by some as arising from the cognitive dissonance between the expectations of early Christians, including the Parousia and their own security, and the socio-economic realities within which they found themselves, including social deprivation and loss of status.20 The Apocalypse is then seen as an attempt to create conflict, or at least to intensify the perception of conflict, with their environment by strengthening the lines of demarcation. On the other hand, a strong case can be made for the existence of genuine, if localized, opposition and persecution within the experience of author and audience.21 At the very least, the memory (or at least knowledge) of earlier persecutions, such as those 17 See Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 88–97; Kraybill, Imperial Cult, pp. 24–56 and throughout; P. A. Harland, ‘Honouring the Emperor or Assailing the Beast: Participation in Civic Life among Associations (Jewish, Christian and Other) in Asia Minor and in the Apocalypse of John’, JSNT 77 (2000), pp. 99–121. 18 Despite Friesen’s substantive criticisms of Ramsay and Hemer (‘Revelation, Realia, and Religion’), I am not here dismissing their concerns and retreating into a text-internal world. It is simply that I do not in general find local details to be necessary as a priori assumptions when investigating the relationship between the people of God as portrayed in the visions of Rev. 4:1–22:9 and the implied audience. 19 So Kraybill, Imperial Cult, pp. 34–38; Thompson, The Book of Revelation, pp. 95–115; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 69–73; Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation, pp. 124–9; P. J. J. Botha, ‘The Historical Domitian – Illustrating Some Problems of Historiography’, Neot 23 (1989), pp. 45–59. 20 J. G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975), pp. 22–49; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 54–110, 154–61. 21 The case is well made by Slater, Christ and Community, pp. 26–42; see also Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, Revelation, p. 27; Boring, Revelation, pp. 8–16. Note also the case for Jewish opposition in J. Lambrecht, ‘Jewish Slander: A Note on Revelation 2, 9–10’, ETL 75 (1999), pp. 421–9; A. J. Beagley, The ‘Sitz im Leben’ of the Apocalypse with Particular Reference to the Role of the Church’s Enemies (BZNW, 50; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987).


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under Nero, is in all likelihood a feature of the cognitive environment.22 I shall assume something more like this latter position, that the author and audience were aware, either by personal experience or from recent collective memory, of the implications of the conflict of loyalties in which they found themselves.23 Evidence from the book itself suggests that these external conflicts gave rise to tensions within the churches themselves, between groups who responded differently to the external pressures.24

. . . positively received . . . inclusion in the canon . . . As Barr points out, this is a fundamental given about the text of Revelation. It is the guarantee of its optimal relevance, not only in its original communication situation, but also in its subsequent communication to later generations of Christians.25 22 This question is connected to that of date, with some of the authors listed above concluding that the Neronian persecutions are in the much more recent past, at least of some of the material of the book. I am assuming a mid-90s date, but thirty years is not a long time in communal memory. 23 On the relationship of early Christians to their social environment, see further J. Knight, Revelation (Readings: A New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 24–8; Thompson, Apocalypse and Empire, pp. 186–97; Kraybill, Imperial Cult, pp. 38–56; Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, pp. 111–40; D. A. deSilva, ‘The “Image of the Beast” and the Christians in Asia Minor: Escalation of Sectarian Tension in Revelation 13’, TrinJ 12NS (1991), p. 191; J. E. Hurtgen, Anti-Language in the Apocalypse of John (Lewiston: Mellen Biblical Press, 1993); Meeks, Moral World, pp. 97–107, 143–7; M. Volf, ‘Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter’, Ex Auditu 10 (1994), pp. 15–30. 24 On the relationship between external and internal conflicts see E. Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, ‘Apocalyptic and Gnosis in the Book of Revelation and Paul’, JBL 92 (1973), pp. 565– 81; P. B. Duff, ‘ “I Will Give to Each of You as Your Works Deserve”: The Fiery-Eyed Son of God in Rev 2.18–23’, NTS 43 (1997), pp. 116–33; D. Hellholm, ‘The Mighty Minority of Gnostic Christians’, in D. Hellholm, H. Moxnes, and T. K. Seim (eds.), Mighty Minorities? Minorities in Early Christianity – Positions and Strategies: Essays in Honour of Jacob Jervell (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995), pp. 41–66; Gager, Kingdom and Community, p. 88; A. Yarbro Collins, ‘Insiders and Outsiders in the Book of Revelation and its Social Context’, in J. Neusner and E. S. Frerichs (eds.), ‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Christians, Jews and ‘Others’ in Late Antiquity (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 187–218; A. Yarbro Collins, ‘Vilification and Self-Definition in the Book of Revelation’, HTR 79 (1986), pp. 308–20; deSilva, ‘Social Setting’, pp. 286–96; Trebilco, ‘The Early Christians and the World Out There’; R. C. Webber, ‘Group Solidarity in the Revelation of John’, in D. J. Lull (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers 1988 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 132–40; H. Räisänen, ‘The Clash between Christian Styles of Life in the Book of Revelation’, in Hellholm, Moxnes, and Seim, Mighty Minorities?, pp. 152–66. 25 See again Barr, ‘Symbolic Transformation’, p. 39, and Chapter 1, p. 3 above. On the other hand, it is not necessary that Revelation was positively received by all members of the churches, or indeed by all churches. Evidence listed in Chapter 1, n. 1 shows otherwise. But even to those who rejected it, it was still highly relevant in the technical sense.

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These assumptions define a set of intersecting contexts within which the Apocalypse is located. It is neither possible nor theoretically defensible to state precisely which of these contexts are more relevant than others, although there is a degree of presumption in favour of the context created by the text itself as being the most prominent one to someone hearing or reading the text. Apart from this, from an RT perspective, context is continually evolving. We may decide at one point that an OT text is more accessible or yields better results than a Roman myth, at another point that a local geographical or social feature is more relevant than an obscure verse in Leviticus. The criterion in each case is the trade-off between processing effort and cognitive results. 3.3

The context in the text A relevance approach to discourse structure

Relevance Theory requires us to understand how a passage relates not only to the text-external, but also to the text-internal environment, or cotext. But how much of the co-text is accessed in constructing meaning? How far back can the audience roam in searching for clues to the identity of a referent? Are there natural boundaries in the text beyond which the search will not normally stray? Can a much earlier text segment form the context for interpreting a later one if the two are clearly linked by markers of surface-level cohesion or semantic coherence? Questions such as these, which are central to the reconstruction of cognitive environments, force us to look at the syntactic and semantic discourse structure of the text. In particular we require a discourse-segmentation approach which analyses the text into hierarchically linked segments and explores the relationship between these segments.26 But more specifically still, our particular focus in this study is the people of God in the book of Revelation. We aim to explore the way in which the auditors of the book found themselves addressed and the ways in which they might have related to the characters in the vision narratives. How were they attracted to listen, what personal relevance might they have perceived 26 For an example of this approach on another NT book, see G. H. Guthrie, ‘Cohesion Shifts and Stitches in Philippians’, in S. E. Porter and D. A. Carson (eds.), Discourse Analysis and Other Topics in Biblical Greek (JSNTSup, 113; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 36–59. It is the primary approach, as we shall shortly see, of Hellholm, ‘Problem’, and is also the approach reflected in (or assumed by) the ‘Discourse Segmentation Analysis’ level of footnotes in UBS4.


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in the visions, and how were they motivated by the vision accounts? In order to answer these questions it is necessary to identify the participants of each communication level of the text, and of each scene within the vision narrative.27 A discourse approach which focusses on the role and relationship of participants in the text is thus a necessary starting point.28 Although discourse-segmentation and participant-reference approaches are theoretically distinct, they are intimately interrelated. The structure of the book of Revelation has both intrigued and frustrated generations of commentators and scholars, justifying Beale’s description of the field as ‘a maze of interpretative confusion.’29 Fortunately, Relevance Theory not only forces us to address it once more, but also provides a more rigorous criterion in what is often a subjective enterprise. Following Blass, it is helpful to define units of text in terms of identity or similarity of cognitive environment.30 Structural units which contribute to meaning at every level, from the smallest up to the whole text, can be defined as sections of text over which there is an optimization of relevance. Hierarchical and coordinate relationships between such units will also be such as to optimize relevance for the complex of units being studied. While RT provides a clear criterion for making decisions about structure, it does not allow us to make any absolute claims about the structure revealed.31 The recognition that the cognitive environments which we can reproduce from this distance in time and space may fail accurately to represent aspects of the original communication situation, and especially that we do not know what may be missing from our reconstruction of 27 I use ‘participant’ here in the sense of a human or other intelligent being, rather than in the broader linguistic sense in which any nominal or pronominal entity can be considered a participant. 28 For an example of this type of discourse analysis, see J. T. Reed, ‘To Timothy or Not? A Discourse Analysis of 1 Timothy’, in S. E. Porter and D. A. Carson (eds.), Biblical Greek Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research (JSNTSup, 80; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 90–118. 29 Beale, Revelation, p. 108. Beale’s commentary provides a comprehensive and helpful review of structural work on the Apocalypse (pp. 108–35, 141–4), as well as advancing his own proposal (pp. 135–41, 152–70), which will be examined later. For another useful analysis of structural approaches based around thirteen different ‘organizing principles’ see E. Müller, Microstructural Analysis of Revelation 4–11 (AUSDDS, 21; Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1994), pp. 13–27. See also E. Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Composition and Structure of the Book of Revelation’, CBQ 39 (1977), pp. 345–50, and the notes there. 30 Blass, Relevance Relations, p. 78. 31 Sch¨ ussler Fiorenza, ‘Composition’, p. 365, defends her analysis of the structure of Revelation against the accusation that it is ‘just one more subjectivist enterprise’, and J. Lambrecht, ‘A Structuration of Revelation 4,1–22, 5’, in J. Lambrecht (ed.), L’Apocalypse johannique et l’apocalyptique dans le Nouveau Testament (BETL, 53; Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1980), p. 103, responding, claims that his (quite different) analysis is not so.

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the context, requires that the structure be offered tentatively, as a framework for further study. Nevertheless, some such model is a necessary preliminary to studying any given passage with regard to its relevance relations, providing as it does a prioritizing of co-textual environments within which the passage is heard. The discourse structure of the Apocalypse The details of both the analysis and the results of a relevance-guided discourse analysis of the Apocalypse have been presented elsewhere and are outside the scope of this present study.32 But a summary of some of the more important results is in order. There is a broadly chiastic structure to the letter which forms the greater part of the book, but relevance considerations forbid splitting off the title in 1:1–3, as it finds its echoes in the final prophetic sections of the letter.33 1:1–3 Title 1:4–22:21 Letter A 1:4–6 Formal letter opening B 1:7–8 Prophetic messages and response C 1:9–22:11 Letter body C1 1:9–11 Prologue to vision reports – command to write C2 1:12–22:9 Vision reports 1:12–3:22 First vision report 4:1–22:9 Second vision report 4:1–11:19 Second vision report Part 1 12:1–22:9 Second vision report Part 2 C1 22:10–11 Epilogue to vision reports – command not to seal B 22:12–20 Prophetic messages and response A 22:21 Formal letter closing The outer layer of the structure, comprising the title and epistolary envelope, is relatively uncontroversial, although some have given insufficient weight to the epistolary form. Relevance considerations have emphasized this form and have gone some way towards precision with regard to the shape of the ending in particular. 32 33

See Pattemore, Discourse Structure. RT leads me to be suspicious of many of the chiastic structures which have been suggested, especially any which involve reordering the text. Apart from the broad chiasm displayed here, ch. 18 appears to be the most likely candidate for this form.


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The division of the visionary section into two main parts, with the break between 3:22 and 4:1, is likewise almost universally perceived. But it is within the section 4:1–22:9 that most structural debate occurs. One of the main questions has to do with the relationship of the three numbered septets, the seals, trumpets, and bowls. Are they intended to be sequential to each other, and if so do they recapitulate each other, or are they all part of a single structure with the trumpets part of the seventh seal and the bowls part of the seventh trumpet? I have shown that 8:1 and 11:19 are the crucial hinges in this debate and have concluded that while the trumpets are part of the seventh seal, there is not such a close relationship between the bowls and the trumpets, at least in the text as it has reached us.34 The integrity of 12:1–22:9 as a textual unit is supported by the observation that it is only in this, the second half of the vision description 4:1–22:9, that the communication axis shifts on a number of occasions, as the author appears to communicate directly to his audience, rather than via his narration of the vision. Such shifts occur at 13:9–10, 18; 14:12; 16:15; 17:9a; 19:8b; 20:5b–6; and 22:7. The breaking of the unitary communication mode prepares the way for and leads into the finale, where the variation of voices may appear confusing. In fact, that variation is seen to be a deliberate structural device, used to bring the voice of God with immediate force to the audience, who themselves are far removed in time and space from the visionary experience. The display of the discourse structure of a large text is always problematical, and, given the intricacy of the textual web which John has woven, this is more than ever true of Revelation. The Appendix (pp. 220– 5 below) provides a simplified outline of the structure of the entire book and highlights a significant feature. There are a number of places at which there are ‘empty text shells’, junctures at which sequences embedded by two or more levels all begin at the identical place. The obvious ones are 1:12; 4:1; 8:2; 12:1 (the most pronounced of all, with five different levels of text beginning at the same point); 13:1; 14:1; 15:1; 17:1; 17:3b; and 19:11. With the exception of 17:3b, these have all been determined on other grounds to be important disjunctures in the text. A number of other results on a smaller scale are worth noting. The RT definition of the context of a communication as the ‘mutual cognitive environment’, including situational and intertextual as well as co-textual 34 If chs. 12–14 form an insertion either by the author or by an editor, then the earlier relationship of the bowls to the trumpets may have been much closer. But I have also demonstrated strong continuities between chs. 12–14 and what precedes them, so this is unlikely to be the case.

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elements, has led to the identification of structures not apparent if the text is considered in isolation. These include the structural role of the phrase , from Daniel 2; the place of Daniel 7 as a background structure to Revelation 7 and 13–14; the role of the ark of the covenant in 11:19; and the relationship of Revelation 7 to the Synoptic Apocalypse. Further, focussing on the physical and sociological context in which the communication was taking place has helped to make sense of the apparently disjointed voices of the end of ch. 22, and the earlier embedded shifts in communication axis. Finally, the necessity under the principle of relevance to prioritize potential contexts and the limits placed on how far a text is processed have led to the elimination of certain proposed ‘background’ texts, such as the suggestion of Isaiah 66 behind 11:19–12:5, or the suggestion that Babylonian or Canaanite mythology has real interpretive significance for John’s audience hearing Revelation 12.35 The people of God in the Apocalypse The second main goal of the discourse analysis was to identify the most significant passages where the people of God, in one guise or another, are featured. As might be expected, every major section of the Apocalypse has some reference to the people of God. However, there are long stretches in which they are present only by implication, or as a contrastive image to those actually in focus. As a result of the discourse analysis presented above, it is now possible to identify three different ways in which the people of God are represented in the Apocalypse, as addressees, as audience, and as actors. The third can be further analysed into three categories. (1)

Addressees

In the outermost layer of the Apocalypse, 1:1–11; 22:10–21, which includes slightly more than what is traditionally referred to as the ‘epistolary envelope’, real Christians in a particular social and religious environment are directly addressed by the author. While it is true that the whole book is a communication from the author to this audience, for most of the book he is narrating his visions, and other modes of reference are superimposed on the direct address to the readers/hearers. In this outer layer, by use of the conventions of letter-writing supplemented by prophetic 35 The issues mentioned in this paragraph can be found discussed in Pattemore, Discourse Structure, pp. 91–2; 149–51; 119–20; 129; 95–9; 119; 146–7 respectively.


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words, the author is in the most direct, unmediated communication with his addressees.36 (2)

Audience

Within the first vision narrative, 1:12–3:22, while formally recounting his own experience, and indeed by means of recounting that experience, John is in fact communicating messages of encouragement, rebuke, challenge, and hope to the particular congregations to which the letter is addressed. It is by means of references in this layer of vision narration, rather than the outer one, that we find out most about the congregations, both those which receive approval and those which are rebuked. The real audience are very much in view. This is rarely the case in the second vision narrative, 4:1– 22:9, but the exceptions prove to be important. These occur exclusively in the second half, 12:1–22:9, and take the form of short asides to the audience, sometimes only a few words long. They are text sequences which do not have any obvious source or target within the vision narrative itself and make most sense as direct words from the author to his audience, although some are prophetic words and have a similar communication axis to the messages of Jesus to the churches. They occur, as already mentioned, at 13:9–10, 18; 14:12; 16:15; 17:9a; 19:6b; 20:5b–6; and 22:7.37 Further, the significance of these is enhanced when we note that all seven macarisms of the Apocalypse (1:3; 14:13; 16:15; 19:9; 20:6; 22:7; 22:14) are either part of the outer envelope of direct address to the audience, or are closely linked with one of these embedded situations of direct address. Taken together, the macarisms and the asides to the audience appear to be highly significant places where the content of the vision is integrated with John’s relationship to the churches and is given ethical and hortatory impact. (3)

Actors

With the exception of the direct asides mentioned above, the people of God feature in the second vision narrative (4:1–22:9) as actors in the 36 These addressees potentially include not only the members of the seven churches to which the letter is addressed, but also the wider group envisaged as audience by the title and some elements in the ending. 37 Vanni, ‘Liturgical Dialogue’, pp. 365–70, suggests that at these points we have a ‘tendency towards dialogue’. The liturgical nature of these asides must be questioned on the principle of relevance – by means of what assumptions would the audience infer that a liturgical process is inserted into the vision narration? Nevertheless, Vanni clearly emphasizes the change in communication situation which they demand.

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drama which is being presented, in three distinct ways. First, and most commonly, they are referred to in speeches by other actors, though they themselves are off stage in these particular scenes. They are part of creation (4:11), and more particularly the focus of the redemption effected by the death of the Lamb (5:9–10), they are secured against disaster (7:1– 8; cf. 9:4), their prayers are offered to God as incense (5:8, 8:3). God’s victory is theirs too and is their vindication and reward (11:18; 12:10–11; 17:14). The condemnation of the whore, Babylon, is based, at least in part, on her treatment of the people of God (17:6; 18:24), and they are called on to celebrate her downfall (18:4–7, 20). In none of these passages does John report seeing the saints or prophets or witnesses to Jesus. They are off stage, but very much part of the drama. The second mode of appearance of the people of God as actors is as members of a larger group on the heavenly stage. Frequently this group are involved in the worship of God (and so could be described as in the chorus), but there are a number of other occasions when they are present. In these places the people of God are not directly in focus, but nevertheless they are located within the cosmic scheme and, more particularly, in relationship to God. Thus they are implicitly part of the heavenly worship of all creation (5:13) and of the great crowd (19:1, 6), but are also presumably among those (‘on earth’) who are not found worthy to open the seals (5:3) and among those judged at the great white throne (20:11–15). We may also include here the references to the twenty-four elders, who are also a part of the chorus of heavenly worship (4:4, 10f.; 5:8–9; 11:16–18; 19:4), and who probably stand in some relationship to the old and new people of God. Finally, we should note the relatively few occasions on which the people of God, in one form or another, take centre stage as the focus of John’s vision. Here we are shown the souls of those beheaded, under the altar (6:9–11 and perhaps 16:7), the great crowd of those who have come through the tribulation worshipping the Lamb (7:9–17), and the two witnesses and prophets in the suffering and victory contingent on their ministry (11:3–13). The people of God are attacked by the dragon and the beasts (chs. 12–13, though it is the dragon and the beasts who are more clearly in focus through these chapters), the 144,000 followers of the Lamb stand with him on Mt Zion (14:1–5), the conquerors of the beast worship God in heaven (15:2–4), and the martyrs rule with Christ for 1,000 years, before again becoming the target of enemy attacks (20:4–10). In the New Jerusalem passages, we have to deal with a complex image of the people of God both as place and as inhabitants of that


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place (21:1–22:5). It is the city itself which is explicitly described, but the inhabitants are referred to as well, and the controlling image is of God dwelling in and with his people. The aim of the remainder of this study will be to examine in detail the references to the people of God as actors, particularly those where they are on centre stage, against the background of the communication situation envisaged between the author and the addressees and audience.

4 S O U L S U N D E R T H E A LTA R – A M A RT Y R ECCLESIOLOGY

4.1

Introduction

We begin our study of the role of the people of God in the second main vision section of the Apocalypse (4:1–22:9) with the vision of the fifth seal. Here, for the first time since the narration opened in 4:1, the people of God take centre stage as the main focus of the account. Previously their redemption has been referred to in the song of the twenty-four elders (5:9–10), who also carry the golden incense bowls containing the prayers of the saints (5:8). They are implicitly among those ‘on earth’ (5:3) who are not worthy to open the scroll, and also a part of the whole created order (including that ‘on earth’, 5:13) that joins the heavenly worship of the Lamb. The question of whether they are the object of some or all of the calamities of 6:1–8 will be addressed shortly, but it is not until 6:9 that a representation of the people of God becomes the direct object of John’s vision, and in such a way as to provide the audience, not with an easy point of identification, but with an implicit challenge to identification, which we shall find to be one of the primary modes of John’s rhetorical technique. The passage is also important as the starting point for a number of threads which are woven into the whole fabric of the book’s tapestry and form the basis for a major conclusion regarding the people of God in the Apocalypse: John challenges his audience to model themselves on the Lamb, finding vindication and victory through suffering and martyrdom (in its double sense of bearing witness and death as a result of witness).1 We begin by examining the contexts, both immediate and more distant, which are called up by the opening words of the vision narration. 1 J. P. Heil, ‘The Fifth Seal (Rev 6, 9–11) as Key to the Book of Revelation’, Bib 74 (1993), pp. 220–43, has extensively explored the connections between 6:9–11 and the rest of the Apocalypse. But his thesis that this passage forms the key to the whole book remains unconvincing, largely because the correspondences are often simply listed and not evaluated. It is hoped that the present chapter will at least begin to address this lack.

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Souls under the altar – a martyr ecclesiology

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Following the RT model for the continuing creation of cognitive environments, contexts evoked by later parts of the text will be dealt with as they arise. Next we shall note some of the words and concepts which are first found here in the Apocalypse and for which these verses form the point of departure in the text. Following this we examine what is said about the ‘souls of the slaughtered’, what they say, and the response they receive. Finally we shall trace the connections of this passage to a number of significant later passages and draw some conclusions about the rhetorical force of this particular thread of narrative. 4.2

The context of the vision

The opening words ( ) tie this scene in to an immediate context, or set of contexts, which in turn have already laid open certain prior contexts. The opening of the seven seals (6:1–8:1 and beyond) is a tightly structured segment whose structure has been examined elsewhere.2 The whole sequence is a double vision, set on two stages. On the first stage is the Lion/Lamb standing beside the throne in heaven, surrounded by the angelic hosts (chs. 4–5). He holds the scroll, the focus of attention in ch. 5, and progressively opens each seal. His qualification to do this is that he has conquered (5:5), immediately interpreted in terms of having been slaughtered (5:6), and this has resulted in the redemption of people from every race (5:9–10). On the second stage a series of dramas, largely centred on the earth, is played out as each successive seal is opened. John, the narrator, is himself present in the throne room as shown by his interaction with the elders (5:4–5, and later at 7:13–17). All of this is immediately present to the audience’s understanding by virtue of the numbered seal-openings. The first four seals have themselves opened a number of contexts.3 The riders on four different-coloured horses clearly evoke the visions of Zech. 1:7–17; 6:1–8.4 But what is the point of the allusions? What meaning ‘bleeds over’ from Zechariah into the present context? We should note first that although the motif of the coloured horses is taken from Zechariah, John uses it freely for his own purposes. He has changed the 2 3 4

See Pattemore, Discourse Structure, pp. 124–41. See the helpful discussion in Beale, Revelation, pp. 372–4. On the influence of Zechariah on Revelation see J. Day, ‘The Origin of Armageddon: Revelation 16:16 as an Interpretation of Zechariah 12:11’, in S. E. Porter, P. Joyce, and D. E. Orton (eds.), Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder (BI, 8; Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 320.

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groups of horses, or chariots pulled by sets of horses, into four single horses with their riders. And he is far more interested in the riders than is Zechariah. In Zechariah 1 there is only one man standing in front of the horses, and in Zechariah 6 the riders in the chariots are only implicit. Nevertheless, the clear understanding in Zechariah that the horses or chariots with their riders are agents of God is echoed in Revelation by the summoning of each rider by a member of the heavenly court and in the sequence of ‘divine passives’ by which the riders are empowered.5 In Zechariah the horses or chariots are said to patrol the earth.6 Beale’s extrapolation from this, that they are agents of punishment, is supported by the LXX rendering of yjiWdAta≤ WjynIhe (Zech. 6:8) as , suggesting that perhaps the translators were picking up an echo from Zech. 1:15 where God expresses anger at the nations ( !" #$ %& # ' () for their treatment of Jerusalem and Judah.7 Given the content of Rev. 6:9–11 it may well be that John is calling on just such an allusion in using Zechariah’s coloured horses. Two further features of the horses and their riders are worth noting briefly. First, the identification of the rider on the white horse has aroused more debate than any other, especially in the light of Rev. 19:11–16.8 I assume that he is of the same category as the other three riders, an agent of God sent to bring God’s punishments on the unbelieving world. Secondly, the four chariots in Zechariah 6 are explicitly identified in the text as ‘the four winds of heaven’ and in Jewish tradition as the four beasts of Daniel 7.9 # in verses 2, 3, and 8. Zech. 1:10, MT >JL]hj]hÆ ˘ LXX: ) . Cf. also Zech. 6:7. Beale, Revelation, p. 372. D. Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings: Studies in the Semantics of Soteriological Terms (SNTSMS, 5; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 219, suggests that tæWr is translated by * rather than ) because the latter lacks the psychological dimension of the Hebrew. This may well be so, but does not eliminate the influence of the wider context on the translator. 8 See Aune, Revelation 6–16, pp. 393–4; Beale, Revelation, pp. 375–8; M. Rissi, ‘The Rider on the White Horse: A Study of Revelation 6:1–8’, Int 18 (1964), pp. 407–18; A. Feuillet, ‘Le Premier Cavalier de l’Apocalypse’, ZNW 57 (1966), pp. 229–59; A. Kerkeslager, ‘Apollo, Greco-Roman Prophecy, and the Rider on the White Horse in Rev 6:2’, JBL 112 (1993), pp. 116–21; D. K. K. Wong, ‘The First Horseman of Revelation 6’, BSac 153 (1996), pp. 212–26; M. Bachmann, ‘Noch ein Blick auf den ersten apokalyptischen Reiter (von Apk 6.1–2)’, NTS 44 (1998), pp. 257–78; J. Herzer, ‘Der erste apokalyptische Reiter und der König der Könige. Ein Beitrag zur Christologie der Johannesapokalypse’, NTS 45 (1999), pp. 230–49; J. C. Poirier, ‘The First Rider: A Response to Michael Bachmann’, NTS 45 (1999), pp. 257–62. 9 See references in Beale, Revelation, pp. 386–7. Particularly significant are Targ. Zech. 2:1–4; 4:7; 6:1–8; Targ. Hos. 13:9; and Targ. Ps.-J. Lev. 26:22. Although the targums themselves are much later, it is possible that the traditions they represent may be early enough to be treated, with considerable caution, as a possible cognitive environment for Revelation. See n. 16 below. 5 6 7


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These links create possibilities that will only be picked up again in Revelation 7. The second set of potential contexts opened by the seal sequence is that of covenantal judgments or curses. Four means of judgment are listed in Rev. 6:8, # + %, # " .- # !/, 0 . %/ 1* 1*, though all but the beasts are also present in other parts of the four seal scenes. The same four elements of judgment, in a different order, are found in Ezek. 14:21.10 Here they are descriptive of God’s judgment on Jerusalem, which yet leaves some survivors to contemplate the reasons for the disasters (14:22–3). In the preceding verses similar judgments were hypothetically predicated of other nations (14:12–20). But this passage is only one of a number which, Aune points out, are relatively common in the ‘Deuteronomic portions of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Chronicles.’11 These in turn stem from passages such as Lev. 26:18–28 and Deut. 32:23–7. The objects of these punishments are, in almost every case, the people with whom God has entered into a covenant relationship, who subsequently are unfaithful to the covenant.12 That the people of God have a share in the sufferings recorded in Rev. 6:1–8 may be supported by the observation that throughout these verses John avoids the use of the phrase 2 )* # 1* 1*, which he typically uses for unbelieving humanity.13 But when Beale claims that ‘in Revelation 6 . . . the church community is the focus of the judgments’, he goes far beyond the implicatures which are optimally relevant.14 To begin with he suggests that the ‘beasts of the earth’ are identical with the beasts which appear later, in Rev. 11, 13, 17, as persecutors of the people of God.15 But these passages cannot contribute to the relevance at this point, as none has yet been heard by the audience. On recursive reading or hearing an association may well be made, but given the differing contexts, it will be a somewhat puzzling association and possibly result in the tentative conclusion that the beasts mentioned in 6:8 may represent the same kind of phenomenon as the specific ones mentioned later. The targumic and midrashic evidence quoted by Beale, which identifies the beasts of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32 and the chariots of Zechariah 6 10 LXX: ! " 3 * 45' 6 '* * # 7 * '* !* + 8 % " % ' ! # %"/ # 9 " ) # "8 ) # :1* ;/ 1 *. Note that the LXX has translated the MT’s singular hx;r; hy ;hæ by the plural % '. 11 Aune, Revelation 6–16, p. 402, and references listed there. 12 Jer. 27:8, 13, like Ezek. 14:12–20, speaks hypothetically of ‘any nation’ that will not submit to God’s purpose as suffering these punishments. 13 Rev. 3:10; 6:10; 8:13; 11:10; 13:8, 12, 14; 17:2, 8. See Mounce, Revelation, p. 159. 14 Beale, Revelation, pp. 372–3. 15 Ibid., p. 386.

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with the four beasts and four kingdoms of Daniel 7, is much more to the point, but can only be used with caution, since the texts themselves are too late to constitute a cognitive environment for Revelation.16 In a much closer context, he argues that ! (Rev. 6:4) and (Rev. 6:8) are linked to the use of the same two verbs in 6:9 and 6:11 respectively, where the object is clearly the people of God.17 This may work retrospectively, but not prospectively, suggesting that the fate of the martyrs occurred within the context of the more general woes, but not that these general woes are focussed on the people of God. What, then, is the intended focus or scope of the devastations arising from the first four seals? Recall again that in the majority of texts prior to Revelation where some or all of these means of judgment are mentioned it is the unfaithful covenant community which is the object of the divine punishment. In some passages it is suggested that a remnant will survive the punishments, and for these they have a purifying role.18 But we have noted a few passages where the same punishments might be applied to any nation, at least hypothetically.19 Aune suggests that the closest parallel to their use in Revelation comes in the Psalms of Solomon.20 Here we find that the covenant calamities are the portion of sinners, and that God saves the righteous from them. Beale himself appeals to Sirach 39–40 as evidence that the tradition, of which Rev. 6:8 is a part, recognizes that both the righteous and the unrighteous experience suffering. But note the nuancing of this in Sir. 40:8–9: ‘To all creatures, human and animal, but to sinners seven times more, come death and bloodshed and strife and sword, calamities and famine and ruin and plague.’21 The righteous themselves are not in focus at all. It is the whole of humanity that suffers, with a notably higher proportion for sinners.22 When we turn to Revelation, the descriptions of the results of opening the first four seals contain no suggestion of a purging or purifying of the people of God. Indeed, within the second vision account as a whole (4:1–22:9), in contrast to the first (1:12–3:22), there is no clear 16 Ibid., pp. 386–7. K. J. Cathcart and R. P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets (AramBib, 14; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 16–18, can only suggest that most of the material they have presented dates from after AD 70. For a more positive conclusion regarding an early dating of the Palestinian Targum see M. McNamara, Targum and Testament. Aramaic Paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible: A Light on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 86–9; McNamara, Palestinian Judaism, pp. 213–17; McNamara, The New Testament and the Palestinian Targum, p. 257. 17 Beale, Revelation, p. 389. 18 For example Ezek. 5:8–10; 12:16. 19 Jer. 27:8,13; Ezek. 14:12–20. 20 Pss. Sol. 13:2–3; 15:7; see Aune, Revelation 6–16, p. 402. 21 Sir. 40:8–9, NRSV (my italics). 22 ‘Seven times’ itself suggests a common cognitive environment with Revelation.


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portrayal of God’s people in need of such purifying.23 Although an ethical choice is constantly being placed before the audience, the actors are portrayed in black and white, and the lines of division are uncrossed. Thus although the origin of the four-fold punishments lies in the covenant relationship between God and his people, well before John’s time they have become conventional symbols of God’s response to human rebellion.24 God’s people may share them by virtue of their membership in the human race, but they are not the particular focus. The tradition within which this convention is current is a more easily accessed context than any one of the particular texts in either canonical or extra-canonical literature.25 It is not necessary to go behind the tradition to obtain optimal relevance. This contention is supported by considering another possible cognitive environment within which our passage may be understood, the Synoptic Apocalypse. Many commentators have pointed to parallels, both in content and order, between the visions of the seals and the discourse preserved in different forms in all three Synoptic gospels.26 Here the covenant punishments have taken on an eschatological dimension. They are a part, not so much of God’s regular dealings with humanity, as of his ultimate sanction, and precursors of the eschaton. The persecution of Christ’s followers takes place in this context, but is not identified with the general suffering, which they are nevertheless expected to share.27 We conclude that the immediate context of Rev. 6:1–8, by its evocation of traditions of the sovereign intervention of God to bring about 23 In the first vision, 1:12–3:22, John has already warned some of the communities to which he writes of purifying judgments intended to provoke repentance. Note especially the threat of the sword to Pergamum (2:16) and of sickness and death to Thyatira (2:22–3). But equally there are indications that faithfulness will lead to suffering (2:3, 10) and a discrimination between the fate of the faithful and that of the rest of the world (3:10). 24 As evidenced by the passages from Sirach and Pss. Sol. referred to above. 25 Covenantal curses fit Afzal’s definition of a ‘communal icon’ as ‘a cognitive-social appropriation of an image by a community, that is, an element of the collective imagination that participants in communal conversation can assume they have in common, and that can be taught, edited, satirized, and referred to as a quick means of communicating a complex of ideas’. See C. Afzal, ‘The Communal Icon: Complex Cultural Schemes, Elements of Social Imagination (Matthew 10:32//Luke 12:8 and Rev 3:5, A Case Study’, in V. Wiles, A. Brown, and G. F. Snyder (eds.), Putting Body and Soul Together: Essays in Honor of Robin Scroggs (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1997), p. 58. 26 Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21. See Charles, Revelation, vol. I, pp. 158–60; Farrer, Revelation, pp. 98–9, 103; Beale, Revelation, p. 373; Roloff, Revelation, p. 88; W. J. Harrington, Revelation (SacP, 16; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), p. 90; J. R. Michaels, Revelation (IVPNTC, Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP, 1997), pp. 101–3. 27 Note, for example, the eschatological sufferings, Matt. 24:5–8; the persecution of Christians, Matt. 24:9–13; the implication that Christians share the great suffering, Matt. 24:21–2.

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eschatological judgment on the world, has established for the audience a cognitive environment in which they understand themselves to be a part of the humanity that suffers, that this suffering is the result of God’s action, and yet they expect also to experience a unique dimension of that suffering in the form of persecution. This is the context in which the fifth seal is opened.28 4.3

New features of the passage

In complete contrast to the way in which the introduction to the fifth seal links the audience into an existing cognitive environment, the description of what John saw introduces some new items with little or no immediate precedent. The altar is the first of these, reappearing after this first occurrence at 8:3 (twice), 5; 9:13; 11:1; 14:18; 16:7.29 The definite article would presume the possibility of anaphoric reference. Either this is clumsy writing, or something about the previous descriptions has created the presumption that an altar is part of the scene. Charles argued that this ‘points to a current belief in the existence of an altar of burntoffering in heaven’.30 But the reason for the article can be found in a more immediate context, namely the scene depicted in chs. 4–5. Both Farrer and Yarbro Collins suggest that the throne-room vision has created the atmosphere of a temple, within which an altar is an expected item of furniture.31 Aune traces the origins of the scene to ‘the ancient 28 Non-textual features which might contribute to the cognitive environment include historical circumstances (for example the Domitianic edict about vines in the early 90s, or particular famines – see Aune, Revelation 6–16, pp. 398–400) or elements of the common world-view such as the influence of the stars, as discussed by Malina, Genre and Message, pp. 54, 121–8. These features do not appear to exercise a definitive role in establishing the prior context within which to read 6:9–11. Malina’s proposals cannot be lightly dismissed, founded as they are on an assumption consonant with RT, that the meaning of a book like Revelation must be sought within the mental outlook of first-century Mediterraneans (pp. 10–11). While Malina has demonstrated the importance of astrology in the period generally, he has not been able to establish its role in Christian literature. Note his acknowledgment, p. 19, that to call John an astral prophet is an assumption. 29 Cf. Heil, ‘The Fifth Seal’, p. 221, n. 2, who claims that it only occurs at 6:9 and 8:3. E. Lohmeyer, Die Offenbarung des Johannes (HNT, 16; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1953), p. 63, leaving out 11:1, suggests that seven occurrences is probably not accidental. 30 Charles, Revelation, vol. I, p. 172. See also pp. 226–30. 31 Thus, in describing a dining room, it would be entirely in order to refer to ‘the table’ without having previously mentioned it, or without the audience’s knowledge of the existence of that particular table. See A. Yarbro Collins, The Apocalypse (NTM, 22; Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1979); Briggs, Jewish Temple Imagery, p. 46; Farrer, Revelation, p. 101: ‘So the Presence may be seen as a temple, and we may look to find throne and altar both there.’


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conception of the divine council or assembly found in Mesopotamia, Ugarit and Phoenicia as well as in Israel’.32 But he goes on to say ‘Most throne visions, for obvious reasons, are set in heaven, though in some the earthly temple and heavenly throne room merge (e.g., Isa. 6:1–13)’, and cites, with implicit approval, Oswalt’s argument that to try and decide between the heavenly and earthly temples as locations for Isaiah 6 is to take the text too literally.33 These are helpful observations in the present case, especially as the altar appears, similarly assumed to exist in the context, in Isa. 6:6.34 The merging of a throne room with a heavenly representation of the temple, already a familiar image from Isaiah’s visions, would seem to offer the best explanation for the sudden appearance of the altar.35 Which of the two Israelite altars is represented by the heavenly altar is disputed, and John may even be blending the images.36 But certain important implicatures are made accessible by the concept of an altar without regard to which altar it is. These include the concepts of offering something to God (i.e. sacrifice) and of a cultically expressed relationship between humans and God. Musvosvi goes further and argues, first, that the altar represents the sacrifice itself, and further, that this connects it to OT concepts of judgment and vindication.37 These implicatures will be shown to have great significance for the understanding of the status of the people of God in the present text. Other roots or phrases which first occur in 6:9–11 (together with their subsequent appearances) are:

32 33

Aune, Revelation 1–5, p. 277. See also Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation, p. 59. Aune, Revelation 1–5, p. 277, following J. N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39 (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 176. 34 MT has the angel bring a coal tæBez“MIhæ lxæme, LXX: ) % . 35 See further Stevenson, Power and Place, pp. 232–7, for a discussion of the interaction of images of temple, throne room, and altar. 36 See Exod. 27:1–8; 30:1–10; Heb. 9. Favouring the altar of incense are Beale, Revelation, p. 391; Farrer, Revelation, p. 101; Briggs, Jewish Temple Imagery, pp. 80–1; and the altar of burnt offering Roloff, Revelation, p. 89; Aune, Revelation 6–16, p. 405; Sweet, Revelation, p. 142; G. B. Caird, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (London: A. & C. Black, 1966), p. 84; H. Kraft, Die Offenbarung des Johannes (HNT, 16a; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1974), p. 119. F. J. Murphy, Fallen is Babylon: The Revelation to John (NTC, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), p. 208 and Mounce, Revelation, p. 157, follow Charles, Revelation, vol. I, p. 172, in holding that John’s altar blends the two. Although Malina, Genre and Message, pp. 128–32, can find evidence to support the idea of the Altar as a constellation, he does not account for John’s invariable term 7 . The textual references would appear to have an advantage here. 37 J. N. Musvosvi, Vengeance in the Apocalypse (AUSDDS, 17; Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1993), p. 187.

76

The People of God in the Apocalypse /* (unique) * (unique) %/ (11:18; 16:5; 18:8, 20; 19:2, 11; 20:12, 13) # / (elsewhere only 19:2, associated also with the blood of saints) ? @. (the first reference to the blood of God’s people, subsequently at 16:6; 17:6; 18:24; 19:2) "7 (7:9, 13, 14; 22:14) (7:14; 9:4; 17:7; 19:3; 21:5, 6; 22:6; 22:17) 3/ (14:13) = * * (the combination first here, then 20:3) 3 " * (19:10; 22:9; but note )" * previously at 1:1 (twice); 2:20)

While some of these are incidental (for example ), others are unique to this passage (for example >/* and *), or occur rarely and in contexts similarly focussed on martyrs (for example # / 3/ = * *), and some become extremely important concepts in the rest of the book, and particularly in regard to the people of God (for example

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