Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 62:2 (NA 2011)
Article: Spiritually Called Sodom And Egypt Getting To The Heart Of Early Christian Prophecy Through The Apocalypse Of John
Author: Andrew Harker

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TynBull 62:2 (2011) p. 317

Spiritually Called Sodom And Egypt
Getting To The Heart Of Early Christian Prophecy Through The Apocalypse Of John1

Andrew Harker

This work engages with and refreshes the debate regarding the nature of early Christian prophecy—a debate that has become somewhat deadlocked and stale—by placing Revelation at the centre of the debate and finding there a tertium quid challenging both sides of the debate. It is argued that Revelation is much more likely to be representative of regular early Christian prophecy than is often assumed and that what constitutes John’s prophecy (and potentially early Christian prophecy generally) as prophecy is essentially the way in which the text moves the affections—by a particularly powerful use of allusive metaphor to ‘name’ features of the contemporary world in such a way that the referent is completely swallowed up by the allusion.

The argument moves in four steps. The first (Ch. 1) identifies a certain polarisation of the scholarship between ‘prophecy as oracle’ and ‘prophecy as exposition’. The former draws prophecy as stereotypically direct, specific revelation, spontaneously received outside of cognitive reflective processes and typically delivered as a short utterance. The latter sees prophecy as ‘doing theology’—a hermeneutical exercise involving exegesis of prior texts resulting in extended discourses. These positions have deep roots in Anabaptist and Reformed traditions respectively—ecclesiological roots that explain a number of features of the debate including relatively little attention given to Revelation as a source.

Secondly, it is argued, against the scholarly consensus, that Revelation is, in its entirety, an example of mainstream early Christian prophecy. Chapter two examines the emic evidence—the way in which the book of Revelation, by a multitude of implicit and explicit markers, declares itself to be a prophecy. While many of these arguments are not

TynBull 62:2 (2011) p. 318

novel the chapter adds weight to the argument that Revelation would have been heard initially in a single sitting and raises the possibility of an allusion to (or at least echo of) Exodus 3 at Revelation 1:1 (God/Jesus signalling a new revelation for his people by sending his angel to his servant) that introduces the text as a new book of Moses. The third chapter turns to etic criteria, seeking to discern how Revelation might have been received by its first hearers. To what extent would it have met their expectations of prophecy? Pauline, OT and Palestinian prophetic traditions would probably have been most importa...

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