Revealing Revelation

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hello everyone, Stakuya here.

Dan McClellan (0:02)

And I'm Gabby.

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

And we are the hosts of History of Everything, a podcast which you can probably guess by the name is, well, I mean, it's about everything. Do you want to know why people thought potatoes were evil and would give you syphilis? Are you curious about all the stories of the terrible and stupid ways that people have kicked the bucket over the years?

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Dan McClellan (0:41)

Some of the features of Jewish apocalyptic texts. This is usually a revelation given to somebody, to a human, from some kind of divine being, an angel, or some kind of psycho-pomp is the pedantic word.

Dan Beecher (0:54)

Wait, I'm sorry, some kind of what?

Dan McClellan (0:55)

Psycho-pomp.

Dan Beecher (0:57)

If that's not a German like EDM group, I don't know what's happening.

Dan McClellan (1:06)

Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:08)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:09)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are the vibes today, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:22)

It's the end of the world as we know it. I think, and I feel fine.

Dan McClellan (1:26)

Yeah, that's the way it goes. Leonard Bernstein, right?

Dan Beecher (1:30)

Yes, I think so. Irving Berlin, I'm not sure.

Dan McClellan (1:34)

Yeah, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.

And at some point, we will be responsible for paying for, or you probably have to sing them. I don't know.

Dan Beecher (1:45)

Yeah, don't tell the royalties people that we quote things. I think you can quote a little bit.

Dan McClellan (1:50)

Yeah, hopefully.

Dan Beecher (1:52)

Yeah, but it is the end of the world that we're talking about, or is it, Dan? Because we're doing a chapter and verse that perhaps we should just call book.

Dan McClellan (2:05)

Book, yeah. My job is book.

So, and that book is the book of Revelation, or revelations if you don't know what you're talking about.

Dan Beecher (2:16)

Right, or if you've just been taught wrong your whole life, which is totally understandable, because everybody says revelations.

Everybody pluralizes it. And in fairness to them, there are many revelations in this book called Revelation. There are several of them.

Dan McClellan (2:34)

Well, the very first verse starts off, the Revelation of Jesus Christ. But yeah, the Society of Biblical Literature, they sell T-shirts, it says revelations, and then there's a red X over the S, just as a little tongue-in-cheek reference to that.

Dan Beecher (2:56)

So I think what we're learning is if you want to drive a Bible scholar crazy, just keep bringing up revelations. It'll work like a charm.

Dan McClellan (3:09)

Or if you want to let them know, this is probably gonna be a waste of time for me to engage in this.

Dan Beecher (3:15)

Right, yeah, exactly. But that's the whole, today's whole episode, we are going, we're doing a deep dive, baby.

Dan McClellan (3:24)

Going all in on the apocalypse as it is known in more orthodox traditions and revelation in more Protestant-y traditions. We're gonna talk about some manuscripts, we're gonna talk about dates, we're gonna talk about authors, we're gonna cover what the text is about, and we already have a whole show on the mark of the beast, so we'll address that, but we're not gonna get stuck in the weeds there.

Dan Beecher (3:51)

That beast got marked.

Dan McClellan (3:52)

Yeah.

Dan Beecher (3:53)

We marked it.

Dan McClellan (3:54)

Yes. But I wanted to start, yeah, with where we get this book of revelation from. A lot of people don't know, this book was probably the least popular book of the Bible in early Christianity, but we do have some manuscripts of it that dates to the second century CE. Our earliest manuscripts are probably, I'm gonna rattle off some numbers that aren't gonna mean much to people, but we have one called Papyrus 47, which is from the Chester Beatty collection, and it's actually the majority of chapter nine through chapter 16 That's probably third quarter of the second century CE. We got a little fragment called Papyrus 98 that is just a tiny little bit of a few verses in chapter one.