“And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.” - The Book of Revelation 6:2

About 2,000 years ago, a prophet named John wrote a book about his strange visions while he was in Patmos, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. This John, the Seer, the Revelator, was long believed to be one of Jesus’ apostles, but recent historians have determined that he was a second-generation disciple. In fact, he was likely a political exile, writing for Christians under the threat of persecution by the Roman Empire, and his book, the Book of Revelation, was controversial, obscure, and rejected by many local churches as early as the 2nd century CE. Even after it managed to slip into the Bible as the last book of the canon, for years many doubted its authenticity, and others later branded it as the heretical hallucinations of a madman. 

Despite those controversial origins, the Apocalypse or Revelation of John remains firmly embedded in the Bible as the final chapter of the great saga that opens with Genesis, the beginning of everything. As a bookend to Genesis, Revelation provides a narrative of the end times, the completion of history, and the end of the world. Genesis and Revelation thus constitute the Alpha and the Omega, a surprising expression that the Book of Revelation applies to the divinity. In the opening verses of the Book of Revelation, God says to John, “I am the Alpha and the Omega - the beginning and the end. I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come.” John proclaims, “On the Lord's Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: `Write on a scroll what you see.’” 

His esoteric narrative, impenetrable to most of his readers, is full of symbols, keys, and metaphors, abounds in strange visions and prophecies, monsters, natural catastrophes, and describes terrifying scenes that are typically described as apocalyptic. This fascinating book also features some of the most well-known religious concepts in the West, things that have provoked fear and fascination for centuries, including the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the famous number of the Beast (666), the Antichrist (whom Revelation calls "the beast"), and the whore of Babylon. 

Perhaps inevitably, the interpretation of the Book of Revelation has also generated significant controversy. Once it obtained its canonical status, meaning it was accepted by the whole Church as a divinely inspired text, countless generations immersed themselves in its verses in an effort to decode the visions of the prophet John. Theologians of many ages, and even recent Biblical scholars, have dissected the sentences and found clues regarding the work’s authorship, context, and date of composition. One position is that Revelation is the literal truth of things to come, those who await the return of Christ in the clouds, commanding the Heavenly army, while others take a more spiritual interpretation. Still another position is that the book narrates events that were happening while John composed the tractate, and that it is a codified description, in terms which were understandable to the readers of its time, of the persecution of Christians under Emperor Nero or Emperor Domitian. A more intriguing proposition says that Revelation, in its primitive form, consisted of two or more shorter texts, and interestingly, that it originally formed a Jewish document that originally had nothing to do with Jesus.