JOHN BRADSHAW - It Is Written

52 BABYLON RISING
He executed not only his own mother and stepbrother,
but in all likelihood started the fire that destroyed much
of the city of ancient Rome.
The torching of Rome left Nero highly unpopular with
his subjects, and realizing he needed a scapegoat, Nero
suggested that the Christians in Rome were responsible for
its destruction. As a result, Christians were rounded up and
murdered in astonishingly inhumane ways.
The Roman persecution of the early church was so intense
that the Christians began to use code words to describe the
city. In the Bible, Peter finishes his first letter to his readers
with a cryptic greeting from a mysterious Christian church:
“She who is in Babylon, elect together with you, greets you;
and so does Mark my son” (1 Peter 5:13).
Who could Peter be talking about when he mentions a
group of people in Babylon? These believers cannot have
been a church group in the literal city of Babylon, because
the city of Babylon had been in ruins since the days of
Alexander the Great.
If you check the scholarly footnotes of many editions of
the Bible, you’ll find that a large amount of Bible scholars
believe “Babylon” is code for the city of Rome.
When John wrote the book of Revelation some years
after Peter wrote his letters, Roman persecution against the
church was still burning hot. After a botched execution
attempt, John was exiled to the Island of Patmos, and it
was there that the material for Revelation was born.
John used the name of a historical persecuting power
to symbolize the great persecuting power of the last days
of Earth’s history.