Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

Throughout this turmoil, persecution, lack of faith, and temptation to
despair, faithful Jews turned back to their sacred books to seek consolation and
hope. They leaned especially on God’s clear promises to protect and save His
people, and on the promise of the Messiah Who would be a glorious
conqueror. It is true, they tended to interpret the Lord’s promises in a too
material sense, and to think of a Messiah largely in terms of removing the
Gentile yoke, but their tendency itself was a sound one.
For Jews Only
From this came the Jewish apocalyptic writings. Using as their models
the prophetic writings most used by John, Jewish authors began to write.
Their writings were cloaked in an imagery and a sym bolism which both
appealed to their oriental imaginations and were designed to make the books
intelligible only to Jews and un intelligible to hostile non-Jewish eyes. They
found models for this largely in the predictions of Ezekiel who had already
begun to use these symbolic devices in foretelling the overthrow of the
Babylonian Empire. Sections of Isaiah which modern scholars believe were also
put in their present form in the time of the Babylonian oppression, also served
as the beginning of apocalyptic. Thus this style of writ ing was firmly rooted
in the Old Testament. Furthermore, the first of the really great apocalypses
through and through is the Book of Daniel, part of the Old Testament, which
we now know was written down from older material in the very times of the
persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes.
Other Books
As these books were later to in spire much of John’s imagery, so they did
of a long line of Jewish apocalypses in the two centuries before our Lord’s
birth. Among these books, which in many ways resemble the Apocalypse of
John, are the Book of Henoch, the Apocalypse of Moses or Book of Jubilees, the
Sibylline Oracles, the Testament of the Twelve Patri archs, the Assumption of Moses,
the Apocalypse of Baruch, the so -called Fourth Book of Esdras, the Apocalypse of
Abraham, the Apo calypse of Moses, and others. Some of these were being written,
in fact, while John was on Patmos com posing his Apocalypse.
There is very little direct in fluence of these Jewish apocalypses on John,
though there is some. Where they are most similar is in their common purpose
and origin. All of them are, as literary productions, outgrowths of the
prophetic literature of the Old Testament. All of them, in reliance on the
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