Theology Thursday Book Review: The Fall of Judea
Around the end of November, I started running out of new books to read. One that I'd been reading had to go back to the library, and I needed something to fill the void. And in my Bible reading, I was closing in on Revelation. So, I decided to pick up Revelation and the Fall of Judea again (I started it late last year but shelved it in favor of more interesting stuff).
I'm glad I took it up again, because it's much more interesting than I thought. It starts slowly, but the meat of the book is simply fascinating. It's subtitled A Comparison of Chapters 4 Through 16 to Historical Events of A.D. 27 Through 135, but that's not the limit to what the author, Maurice Williams, attempts to address. He also introduces some novel interpretations of the background of the Apocalypse.
The typical idea of the authorship of Revelation is that John the Beloved Disciple wrote it in about A.D. 95 while imprisoned on the island of Patmos. While this view is widely held, it's not as ironclad as you might think. There are many scholars who feel the date of the writing of Revelation must have been in the 60s, since they believe it had to have been written before Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70. Still others favor the late date but believe that it was another John, called "The Elder," who wrote the Apocalypse (and also the Epistles of John).
Mr. Williams does an end-run around all of them. He believes that the visions of the core chapters (4 through 16) were given to John the Baptist. He's not alone in this, but it was a new view for me. He also believes that the Apostle John wrote the opening and closing chapters, either before or after A.D. 70.
I'm not sure the John the Baptist angle makes sense, and it certainly can't be proved beyond doubt. Be that as it may, that particular nugget doesn't really impact the rest of the book.
Mr. Williams narrates through the history of Judea and focuses in the events particularly in the A.D. 60-135 range. Most pew-dwellers aren't aware that Jerusalem was sacked by Rome in A.D. 70, or that the Temple was destroyed then. Still fewer know of the obliteration of Judea by Rome in A.D. 135. The history surrounding both of these events is fascinating. It really does fit well with John's visions.
Of course, as a partial-preterist (believing that most of Revelation was fulfilled in A.D. 70), this book was right up my alley. But even for someone with more mainstream (I won't say traditional, because the mainstream view is quite new) views, the histories of the Roman/Jewish wars are fascinating. The author nicely narrates the conflicts leading to Jerusalem's destruction, then gives a detailed account of the Bar Kochba revolt. (Bar Kochba was proclaimed Messiah and attempted to kick the Romans out of Judea. And was surprisingly successful before finally losing.)
After Mr. Williams finishes with his survey of the core chapters, he has a chapter about his view of the Millenium. For anyone unfamiliar with Amillenialism, it's a good primer. Basically, the Amillenialist believes the Millenium (literally "1000 years") began at Christ's resurrection and will culminate with Christ's Second Coming. There are some interesting jabs at Protestent Christianity in this chapter, but that's hardly unexpected from a Catholic author.
The final chapter is titled Overview of Previous Interpretations, and it's also worth the price of the book. Since most of us have our End-Times views handed to us from parents or pastors, the history of such views is not widely comprehended. Mr. Williams does a nice job of presenting the development of them from the early church into present times. He manages to keep most of his anti-Protestant bias in check, simply presenting the views of various thinkers in an evenhanded way. This chapter would be of profit to those who aren't aware that there exist views other than the Left Behind paradigm.
I couldn't find the book through normal channels, and ended up getting a copy from Xlibris, an on-demand publishing outfit.
There were some issues with the book which may have been caught in a normal editing/publishing process. Among these issues were a few word mishaps (using "immanent" when "imminent" was intended, for instance), and an inconsistency of tenses (for instance: "Clarke does not believe in a literal millennium. Instead, he expected Satan to be bound...") It's that kind of thing that can make a book seems amateurish.
However, I have nothing in particular against Mr. Williams's scholarship. His survey of the history of the destruction of Jerusalem and Judea was absolutely fascinating, and the latter chapters about the Millenium and the history of Eschatology are very informative, too. For anyone interested in this subject, I'd recommend this book. I just searched, and it can be obtained through InterLibrary Loan for those in Washington County (and other areas serviced by WorldCat).