CHAPTER 6
devastating incursions were so much dreaded at that time that Trajan undertook a Parthian war in 115. Virgil foretells a Roman victory: the bow and the horse have been useless: —
With backward boars the Parthians shall be there, And, spurring from the fight, confess their fear.
Color was also an important and significant detail. The Parthian king in
<660602>
6:2 rides on a white horse. White had been the sacred color among the old Persians, for whom the Parthians stood in later times; and sacred white horses accompanied every Persian army. The commentators who try to force a Roman meaning on this figure say that the Roman general, when celebrating a Triumph, rode on a white horse. This is a mistake; the general in a Triumph wore the purple and gold embroidered robes of Jupiter, and was born like the god in a four horse car.
The use of color here as symbolical is illustrated by the custom of Tamerlane. When he laid siege to a city, he put up white tents, indicating clemency to the enemy. If resistance was prolonged forty days, he changed the tents, and put up red ones, portending a bloody capture.
If obstinate resistance was persisted in for other forty days, black tents were substituted: the city was to be sacked with a general massacre. The meaning of the colors differs; there was no universal principle of
interpretation; significance depended to some extent on circumstances and individual preference.
It is not to be supposed that St. John consciously modeled his
descriptions on works of art. He saw the figures march across the heavens.
But such ideas and symbolic forms were in the atmosphere and in the minds of men at the time; and the ideas with which he was familiar molded the imagery of his visions, unconsciously to himself. It is quite in the style of Greek art that one monster in 13 should rise from the sea and the other appear out of the earth (as we shall see in chapter 7); but those ideas are used with freedom. The shapes of the monsters are not of Greek art; they are modifications of traditional apocalyptic devices; but the seer saw them in situations whose meaning we interpret from the current ideas and forms of art. Hence, e.g., in the Pergamenian letter, the white stone is not to be explained as an imitation of a precisely similar white stone used in ordinary pagan life (as most recent commentators suppose); it is a free
employment of a common form in a new way to suit a Christian idea. The current forms are used in the Apocalypse, not slavishly, but creatively and boldly; and the Parthian king welcomed by the genius of the capital they mustn’t be interpreted pedantically. A new spirit has been put into them by the writer.
FIG. 1: The ideal Parthian king, as he appears on the Parthian Coins, 150 B.C. to 200 A.D.
Thus to refer to the Parthian king of <660602>
6:2: the type of the archer
horseman was familiar to the thought of all in the eastern Provinces; but if we look at the most typical representations, those which occur on coins, we find the various elements separately, but not united. The regular reverse type on Parthian coins shows the founder of the race, Arsaces, deified as Apollo, sitting on the holy omphalos, and holding the bow, the symbol of authority based on military power (see Fig. 1). A rarer type, though
FIG. 2: The Parthian king welcomed by the genius of the capital. Parthian Coins, 42-65 A.D.
common on coins of King Vonones (83-100 A.D.) and of Artabanus III.
(42-65), shows the monarch on horseback welcomed by the genius of the State: Fig. 2 gives the type of Artabanus: the king wears Oriental attire
with characteristic full trousers. The coins of Vonones have a type similar, but complicated by the addition of a third figure.
FIG. 3: Parthian captives sitting under a Roman trophy. Coin of Trajan, 116 A.D.
In Greek and Roman art the Parthian appears, not as victor, but as
vanquished. The coins of Trajan show two Parthian captives, a man and a woman, under a trophy of Roman victory. St. John describes the Parthian king as seen by Roman apprehension, followed by Bloodshed, Scarcity and Death; but that point of view was naturally alien to art, except the art practiced in Parthia. The spirit of the artist, or of the seer of the visions, gives form to the pictures, and they must be interpreted by the spirit.
As to the letters, we notice that there are two pairs of ideas mentioned in
<660120>
1:20, “the seven stars are the angels of the Seven Churches; and the seven lamps are Seven Churches”. Of these, the second pair stand on the earth; and in the first pair, since the stars belong to heaven, the angels also must belong to heaven. There is the earthly pair, the Churches and the lamps that symbolize them; and there is the corresponding heavenly pair, the angels and the stars which symbolize them.
A similar correspondence between a higher and a lower embodiment of Divine character may frequently be observed in the current religious conceptions of that time. We find amid the religious monuments of Asia Minor certain relief’s, which seem to represent the Divine nature on two planes, expressed by the device of two zones in the artistic grouping.
There is an upper zone showing the Divine nature on the higher, what may be called the heavenly plane; and there is a lower zone, in which the god is represented as appearing, under the form of his priest and representative, among the worshippers who come to him on earth, to whom he reveals the right way of approaching him and serving him, to whom he benefits in return for their service and offering duly completed. (One of the best examples of this class of monuments, dated A.D. 100, and belonging to the
circuit of Philadelphia, is published here for the first time after a sketch made by Mrs. Ramsay in 1884. (fig. 4)
FIG. 4: The sacrifice on earth and in heaven: relief from Koloe in Lydia.
The lower zone is a scene representing, according to a type frequent in late art, an ordinary act of public worship. At the right hand side of an altar, which stands under the sacred tree, a priest is performing on the altar the rite by means of which the worshippers are brought into communication with the god. The priest turns towards the left to face the altar, and behind him are five figures in an attitude nearly uniform (the position of the left hand alone varies slightly), who must represent the rest of the college of priests attached to the sanctuary. Their names are given in the inscription which is engraved under the relief. There was always a college of priests, often in considerable numbers, attached to the great sanctuaries or hiera of Anatolia; those priests must be distinguished from the attendants,
ministers, and inferiors, of whom there were large numbers (in some cases several thousands).
The existence of such colleges gives special importance to the Bezan text of <441413>
Acts 14:13, in which the priests of the shrine of Zeus “Before the City,” at Lystra, are mentioned — whereas the accepted text mentions only a single priest.
Professor Blass in his note rejects the Bezan reading on the ground that there was only one priest for each temple; but his argument is founded on purely Greek custom and is not correct for Anatolian temples, like the one at Lystra, where there was always a body or college of priests. In the relief
which we are now studying the mutilation of the inscription makes the number of the priests uncertain; but either seven or eight were mentioned.
At the Milyadic hieron of the same god, Zeus Sabazios, the college numbered six: at Pessinus the college attached to the hieron of the Great Mother contained at least ten. F18
In the upper zone the central action corresponds exactly to the scene in the lower zone: the god stands on a raised platform on the right hand side of an altar, on which he performs the same act of ritual which his priest is performing straight below him on the lower plane, probably pouring out a libation over offerings which lie on the altar. In numerous relief’s and coins of Asia Minor a god or goddess is represented performing the same act over an altar. That one act stands symbolically for the whole series of ritual acts, just as in <660213>
Revelation 2:13 Antipas stands for the entire body of the martyrs who had suffered in Asia. The deity has revealed to men the ritual whereby they can approach him in purity, and present their gifts and prayers with assurance that these will be favorably received: thus the god is his own first priest, and later priests were regarded by the devout as representatives of the god on earth, wearing his dress, acting for him and performing before his worshippers on earth the life and actions of the god on his loftier plane of existence. F19In this relief the intention is obvious: as a sign and guarantee that he accepts the sacred rite, the god is doing in heaven exactly the same act that his priest is performing on earth.
On the right of the raised platform stand three figures, with the right hand raised in adoration. These represent the college of priests, headed by the chief priest; and all must be understood to make the same gesture, though the right hands of the second and third are hidden. The action of the priests who stand in the lower zone behind the chief priest must be interpreted in the same way. On the left of the platform another scene in the ritual and life of the god is represented. He drives forth in his car to make his annual progress through his own land to receive the homage of his people. He is marked as Zeus by the eagle which sits on the reins or the trappings of the horses, and as Sabazios by the serpent on the ground beneath their feet. Beside the horses walks his company on god, regarded as his son in the divine genealogy, and marked as Hermes by the winged caduceus which he carries, and as Men by the crescent and the pointed Phrygian cap. The divine nature regarded as male was commonly
conceived in this double form as father and son; and when these Anatolian ideas were expressed under Greek forms and names, they were described sometimes as Zeus and Hermes (so in <441410>
Acts 14:10, and in this relief), sometimes as Zeus and Apollo or Dionysus. When the deity in his male character was conceived as a single impersonation, he was called in Greek sometimes by one, sometimes by one of those four names. The Greek names were used in this loose varying way, because none of them exactly corresponded to the nature of the Anatolian conception; and sometimes one name, sometimes another, seemed to correspond best to the special aspect of the Anatolian god which was prominent at the moment The god on the car is here represented as beardless, but the god on the platform is bearded; and yet the two are presentments of the same divine power. But this relief is a work of symbolism, not a work of art: it aims not at artistic or dramatic truth, but at showing the divine nature in two of the characters under which it reveals itself to man: the object of the artist was to express a meaning, not to arrive at beauty or consistency.
The interpretation which has just been stated of this symbolical relief would be fairly certain from the analogy of other monuments of the same class; but it is placed beyond doubt by the inscription which occupies the broad lower zone of the stone: “in the year 185 (A.D. 100-101), the thirtieth of Daisios (22nd May), when Glykon was Stephanephoros, the people of Koloe consecrated Zeus Sabazios, the priests being Apollonius,”
etc. (probably seven others were named). F20
The people consecrated Zeus Sabazios either by building him a temple, or simply by erecting a statue in his honor: in either case the action was a stage in the gradual Hellenising of an Anatolian cult in outward show by making it more anthropomorphic. The original Anatolian religion was much less anthropomorphic; it had holy places rather than temples, and worshipped “the God” rather than individualized and specialized embodiments of him. F21 Under the influence of Greek and other foreign examples, temples and statues were introduced into that simple old religion. It is impossible to get back to a stage m which it was entirely imageless and without built temples; but certainly in its earlier stages images and temples played a much smaller part than in the later period.
The symbolism of this monument is so instructive with regard to the popular religious views in Anatolia that a detailed study of it forms the best introduction to this subject. The monument is now built into the inner wall of a house at Koula, a considerable town in Eastern Lydia; but it was brought there from a place about twenty-five miles to the north. It
originates therefore from a secluded part of the country, where Anatolian religious ideas were only beginning to put on an outward gloss of
Hellenism, though their real character was purely Asian. Greek however was the language of the district.
It is fundamentally the same idea of a higher and a lower plane of existence that is expressed in the symbolism of the Angels and the Stars in heaven, corresponding to the Churches and the Lamps on earth. The lamp, which represents the Church, is a natural and obvious symbol. The Church is Divine: it is the kingdom of God among men: in it shines the light that illumines the darkness of the world.
The heavenly pair is more difficult to express precisely in its relation to the earthly pair. There seems to be involved here a conception, common in ancient time generally, that there are intermediate grades of existence to bridge over the vast gap between the pure Divine nature and the earthly manifestation of it. Thus the star and the angel, of whom the star is the symbol, are the intermediate stage between Christ and His Church with its lamp shining in the world. This symbolism was taken over by St. John from the traditional forms of expression in theories regarding the Divine nature and its relation to the world.
Again, we observe that, in the religious symbolic language of the first century, a star denoted the heavenly existence corresponding to a divine being or divine creation or existence located on earth. Thus, in the language of the Roman poets, the divine figure of the Emperor on earth has a star in heaven that corresponds to it and is its heavenly counterpart. So the Imperial family as a whole is also said to have its star, or to be a star. It is a step towards this kind of symbolic phraseology when Horace (Odes, 1, 12) speaks of the Julian star shining like the moon amid the lesser fires;
but probably Horace was hardly conscious of having advanced in this expression beyond the limits of mere poetic metaphor. But when
Domitian built a Temple of the Imperial Flavian family, the poet Statius
describes him as placing the stars of his family (the Flavian) in a new heaven (Silvae, 5, 1, 240 f.). There is implied here a similar conception to that which we are studying in the Revelation: the new Temple on earth corresponds to a new heaven framed to contain the new stars; the divine Emperors of the Flavian family (along with any other member of the family who had been formally deified) are the earthly existence dwelling in the new Temple, as the stars, their heavenly counterparts, move in the new heaven The parallel is close, however widely separate the theological ideals are; and the date of Statius’s poem is about the last year of
Domitian’s reign, A.D. 95-96.
The star, then, is obviously the heavenly object which corresponds to the lamp shining on the earth, though superior in character and purity to it;
and, as the lamp on earth is to the star in heaven, so is the Church on earth to the angel. Such is the relation clearly indicated. The angel is a
corresponding existence on another and higher plane, but more pure in essence, more closely associated with the Divine nature than the individual Church on earth can be.
Now, what is the angel? How shall he be defined or described? In answer to this question, then, one must attempt to describe what is meant by the angels of the Churches in these chapters, although as soon as the
description is written, one recognizes that it is inadequate and hardly correct. The angel of the Church seems to embody and gather together in a personification the powers, the character, the history and life and unity of the Church The angel represents the Divine presence and the Divine power in the Church; he is the Divine guarantee of the vitality and effectiveness of the Church.
This seems clear; but the difficulty begins when we ask what is the relation of the angel to the faults and sins of his Church, and, above all, to the punishment which awaits and is denounced against those sins. The Church in Smyrna or in Ephesus suffers from the faults and weaknesses of the men who compose it: it is guilty of their crimes, and it will be
punished in their person. Is the angel, too, guilty of the sins? Is he to bear the punishment for them?
Undoubtedly the angel is touched and affected by the sins of his Church.
Nothing else is conceivable. He could not be the counterpart or the double
of a Church, unless he was affected in some way by its failings. But the angels of the Churches are addressed, not simply as touched by their faults, but as guilty of them. Most of the angels have been guilty of serious, even deadly sins. Angel of Sardis is dead, though he has the name of being alive The angel of Laodicea is lukewarm and spiritless, and shall be rejected Threats, also, are directed against the angels “I will come against thee,” “I will spit thee out of my mouth,” “I will come to thee “(or rather “I will come in displeasure at thee” is the more exact meaning, as Professor Moulton points out). Again, the angel is regarded as responsible for any neglect of the warning now given, “and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee”: “thou art the wretched one, and poor, and miserable, and blind, and naked”.
These expressions seem to make it clear that the angel could be guilty, and must suffer punishment for his guilt. This is certainly surprising, and, moreover, it is altogether inconsistent with our previous conclusion that the angel is the heavenly counterpart of the Church. He who is guilty and responsible for guilt cannot stand anywhere except on the earth.
The inconsistency, however, is due to the inevitable failure of the writer fully to carry out the symbolism. It is not so difficult to follow out an allegory perfectly, so long as the writer confines himself to the realm of pure fancy; but, if he comes into the sphere of reality and fact, he soon finds that the allegory cannot be wrought out completely; it will not fit the details of life. When John addresses the angels as guilty, he is no longer thinking of them, but of the actual Churches which he knew on earth. The symbolism was complicated and artificial; and, when he began to write the actual letters, he began to feel that he was addressing the actual Churches, and the symbolism dropped from him in great degree. Normally he addresses the Angel, but really he writes to the Church of Ephesus or of Sardis; or rather, all distinction between the Church and its angel vanishes from his mind. He comes into direct contact with real life, and thinks no longer of correctness in the use of symbols and in keeping up the elaborate and rather awkward allegory. He writes naturally, directly, unfettered by symbolical consistency.
The symbolism was imposed on the writer of the Apocalypse by the rather crude literary model, which he imitated in obedience to a prevalent