The Bible's Book of Revelation is basically a fever dream of epic proportions. It shows a vision of the world being destroyed in ways most modern horror writers would be hard-pressed to top. And of course, people today are still familiar with some of its most famous characters, like the Whore of Babylon, the beast marked 666, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The story of Jesus defeating the Antichrist and returning to rule Earth is taken very seriously by many modern churches.
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Revelation (not "Revelations"!) is probably the most difficult book in the Bible to interpret accurately. It's lousy with symbolism and numerology and all these coded messages that your average reader no longer understands, and therefore often takes to mean something completely different. Then there's its bizarre history, from who actually wrote it to why it was added to the Bible to how it shapes foreign policy to this day. Let's dive into the Book of Revelation.
From strange beasts to ominous horse riders, singing angels to bloody Armageddon, the finale of the Christian Bible — the Book of Revelation — might remind you of Johnny Cash's song "When the Man Comes Around" (via Issuu). If this isn't evocative enough, Cash isn't alone when it comes to borrowing images from the last book of the New Testament: Think Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" and Metallica's "The Four Horsemen," and that's just for starters.
The Bible is full of beloved stories. Passages from it are often read at weddings, stories from it are often told to children, and its themes have inspired countless modern books and movies, from "The Chronicles of Narnia" to "The Matrix." According to Mark A. Noll, writing for Houston Christian University: "The Bible has been a permanent fixture in American culture since the beginning of the European settlement of North America."
Regardless of your level of familiarity with the Bible, you're probably aware of the existence of various prophecies scattered throughout its pages. Details about the end times, a final judgment that will supposedly affect all people whether dead or alive, and the like. Now, there's plenty of discussion as to just how accurate these prophecies are. Depending on your point of view, you might see the Bible, effectively, as a type of mythos — its stories can teach valuable lessons, but whether its prophecies predicted events in the past (rather than explained them after the fact) is another question. Or, you could take it all far more literally, reading biblical prophecies as accurate explanations written before historical events, and thus equally accurate predictions of future events to come. You could even prop up this view with examples of Bible prophecies that eventually came true.
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