I hope you are genuinely interested...frisian said:
Revelation is not a prophecy, its not a foretelling of End of Days. It is a book of powerful symbolism written in 81 AD to persuade the Christians of Asia Minor to resist conversion (even staking their lives) to the coming persecution of the Romans.
Now Yahweh will go into much extraneous but necessary detail, brought to you by Sparknotes:
Now, a bit more extraneous detail written by myself:
The Book of Revelation is a heretical book (unless 7-headed dragons, numerology/witchcraft, a grand bastardization of Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit isnt heretical in your book). How on earth Revelation made it past the Canon when all these other books of the bible didnt is a mystery to me.
The Book of Revelation details quite a bit on the Fall of Babylon, the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire did eventually fall, but the fantastic irony is that it fell after converting to Christianity.
In terms of rationally reconciling apocalyptic prophecy, its simply impossible. I'm sure you couldnt fault a gal like sparklecat for merely thinking.
There is an awful lot of talk about prophecies in the bible. I guess I'm just a little more critical than others, but I am rather unimpressed. There are several mundane ways in which a prediction of the future can be fulfilled.
- Retrodiction. The "prophecy" can be written or modified after the events fulfilling it have already occurred.
- Vagueness. The prophecy can be worded in such a way that people can interpret any outcome as a fulfillment. Nostradomus's prophecies are all of this type. Vagueness works particularly well when people are religiously motivated to believe the prophecies.
- Inevitability. The prophecy can predict something that is almost sure to happen, such as the collapse of a city. Since nothing lasts forever, the city is sure to fall someday. If it hasn't, just say that, according to prophecy, it will.
- Denial. One can claim that the fulfilling events occurred even if they haven't. Or, more commonly, one can forget that the prophecy was ever made.
There are no prophecies in the Bible that cannot easily fit into one or more of those categories.
The New Testament of the Bible is shorter than its predecessor, covers only a few decades of history (as oppose to the Old Testament which covers the Dawn of Time to about 400 BC). The books of the New Testament were written in first- or second-century Palestine, a region that at the time was under the rule of the Roman Empire. Many of the stories are based on the rituals and beliefs of Judaism, as Jesus Christ and his disciples were all Jews. As a result, both Greco-Roman culture and Judaic traditions dominate the political, social, and economic scene of the New Testament. Like the Old Testament, the New Testament consists of a series of stories which are allegorical in nature, the stories adequately reflect the problems and persecutions of the time periods they were written. Some biblical scholars interpret it as a work of literature that uses beautiful poetry to describe religious myths. Others study its ethical and philosophical ideas, as its stories of the faithful attempt to instill certain values and outline an appropriate way to live.
Now, I think I've made it clear that there is no way to rationally reconcile this apocalyptic prophecy as a literal foretelling of events to come.
