brace yourself for the tribulation

[anvi]

The Book of Revelations is a typical piece of underground apocalyptic resistance literature; there are lots of books just like it from that time period written by both Jewish and Christian authors.  The genre demands that present events be written about as if they were prophetic visions of the author.  They use regular forms of symbols and gematriac code to communicate their message in a way that would have been inaccessble to oppressive political authorities that might have gotten hold of the text.  Revelations was written in the mid '90's of the first century under the stress of several-year long persecution of Christians under emperor Domitian.  Babylon in the text symbolizes the first century Roman empire, and the famed number of the beast, 666 (in some alternative manuscripts 616) is the gematriac value yielded by the name Nero Caesar, who had, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, blamed Christians for the burning of Rome and put to death Jesus' brother James.  In the text, Nero, identified by 666 and 616 in an alternative spelling, is actually a subtle reference to the emperor at the time of the text, Domitian, who was known in his day as "Nero revivified."  The author of Revelations, like most first century Christians, thought the second coming was at hand in his time, and so he didn't write a book about what would happen twenty centuries hence.