Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

promises of God, confidently predict a glorious future and the crushing of the
enemies of God’s people. All of them were written to console and to
strengthen faith. For Christian faith, too, had begun to fail in the face of
Roman per secution, as John makes clear in the first chapters of his
Apocalypse. All of them are characterized by involved and extended
symbolism, for John too was a Jew with a Jewish background, and symbolism
was both part of his thought processes and a device to keep his book
unintelligible to hostile readers. Only one familiar with the Jewish tradition
of apocalyptic would know how to take the references to “beasts,” “horns,”
“the sea,” and the like, which had Old Testament meanings already
established.
What makes John so different from the Jewish apocalypses is the reality
of the hope he could offer his readers, a hope that was, in fact, already realized
in the work of Christ. While Judaism could only look forward to an uncertain
future, John could speak of a glorious triumph that was not only immin ent,
but was in fact already ac complished.
In the following article we shall see chiefly in what John and the Jewish
apocalypses are similar, namely in their use of imagery and symbolism. The
remaining articles will deal with what is unique in John, the glorious reign of
the triumphant Christ in His Church on earth and in heaven.
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