Explaining Revelation: How the Christian Churches Distorted God’s Warnings About the Antichrist, Tribulation, and End Times, and Where the Bible Says We Are Today

Evangelical End Times Prophecy is the New ‘Newspeak’ I agree with the author of this book that we have all been deceived about Christian prophesied End Times, including the author of Explaining Revelation who omits any consideration of the scripture: “Only the Father knows the specific day and hour of the End Times”. Nonetheless, Matthew Falsetti has done a good job of contrasting and summarizing the four interpretive institutionalized theological frameworks through which the apocalyptic end times symbolically described in the Book of Revelation are understood by their adherents: Futurism, Historicism, Preterism and Idealism. However, I believe all these four interpretations fail and should be replaced by the category of Secretism. Below I critique Falsetti’s four categorizations: * The Futurist is someone who believes in a future End Times and the Apocalypse, of which they have secret knowledge of (e.g., Evangelical Christians such as Hal Lindsey, The Coming Invasion of Israel, 1974). Edward Irving who founded the Catholic Apostolic Church mentioned by Falsetti is another example of a Futurist (see Irving’s “For Judgment to Come” -1823 and “Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed” - 1826). The Futurist position oddly ignores the inconsistency that the Gospels weren’t written until about 95 A.D., after the prophesied future event of the Jerusalem Temple destruction had already occurred in 70 A.D. Nonetheless, Jesus could have made the prophecy of the temple destruction and “abomination of desolation” orally before 70 A.D., but that would cast doubt on its authenticity and reliability. As for Hal Lindsey’s 1974 prophecy that Russia would invade Israel, 2,000 years later what is unfolding currently is the exact opposite. * The Historicist is someone who believes in the imaginative visions that were written in Revelation around 95 A.D. is the one and only true interpretation of Revelation because it is based on chronology of actual events. Moreover, Historicists like Falsetti believe the Antichrist is the Roman Catholic church as prophesied in the Book of Revelations, although this is never specified in Revelation. Moreover, there wasn’t a so-called bureaucratic satanic Catholic church when Revelation was written, and the Catholic Vatican bureaucracy didn’t exist until about 325 A.D. Falsetti embraces the Historicist approach as the most obvious interpretation. He sees no secrecy or anything hidden in the text, even though Revelation is entirely symbolic and phantasmagorical, leaving room for interpretation in defining who the Antichrist, the Beast, the Whore of Babylon, the Seven Trumpets, the Second Coming, are. The First Century Roman period had only one historian of Jerusalem: Josephus who was a captured Jewish priest and scholar who worked as a propagandist for patronage from the Roman Flavian dynasty of emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Josephus’s book The Judean War (against Rome) has been shown to have been written as propagandist support for the Christian Gospels. Revelation is anachronistic (deviating from the proper order of time), book, not historical or chronological. For example, the Dutch-Judean philosopher, telescope maker, and religious apostate Baruch Spinoza 1632-1677 described anachronistic evidence that seven characters in the Bible were fictional and never could have lived during the era they are described in the Bible. The Book of Genesis describes Abraham having conflicts with the Philistines, but that group did not appear until 700 years later in Canaan not Judea. Thus, Abraham is a folklore character (kind of like “Uncle Sam”), not an actual person who appeared in chronological history asserts Spinoza. Such an error would be like reporting Columbus navigated the ocean using an iPhone and discovered the modern built-out City of New York in 1492. Moreover, dates of events, were often reported to align with religious meanings or holidays. Spinoza’s concept of prophecy is that it was based on imagination, premonitions or presstitution not chronological history. The Bible is organized to give a semblance of being chronological from first (Genesis) to last (Revelation), but it is first organized by genre (Origins, Migration, Instructions, Judges, Kings, Wisdom, Prophets, Gospels, Actions, Letters) first then more or less chronological. But the time when the book was written may not be correlated to the time-period each book portrays. The Bible is anachronistic not historical, chronological, futuristic or contemporaneous. One would have to take any prophecies on pure faith, not history. * The Preterist (meaning past fulfillment) is someone who believes the Second Coming of Jesus and End Times already occurred in the First Century as a purely invisible and spiritual phenomenon. Preterism asserts that the events in Revelation have already been fulfilled. This is plausible but then it destroys any notion that religious prophecy of a future End Times occurring today is credible or even consistent with Jesus’s admonition against predictions cited above. 17th century Jesuit, Alcazar, tried to systematize a Preterest approach to Revelation. Saint Augustine could be considered a Preterist because he believed human consciousness was dependent on the present times not future or past. 4) The Idealist oversimplifies Revelation as an allegory (a symbolic representation that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning). As Falsetti aptly points out, this approach cannot disclose what the true meaning of the Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, etc. are. The Socratic church father Origen believed End Times meant believing the whole world would eventually be converted to Christianity, but this wasn’t a prophecy, chronology or Preterism but a hope and a prayer. Idealism (allegoricalism) departs from straightforward, literal logic, and often infers a hidden meaning where character, time and place are not as important as its meaning or moral teaching. However, an allegory was never designed to be historically coherent nor the basis upon which to prophecy the future. Allegory is a parable. The United Methodist Church and most academics are examples of those who embrace the Idealistic position. Secretism Falsetti omits any consideration that Revelation could have been secret propaganda by the Roman Empire since the Church would have been one of the very few entities that could have produced the books of the New Testament including Revelation (except perhaps Marcion a wealthy shipbuilder-defense contractor who issued his own version of the just the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s Letters). This is the thesis of Joe Atwill in his books Caesar’s Messiah, 2005, and Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, 2014. Atwill describes the purpose of Revelation is secret propaganda meant to announce the end of Roman Emperors’ Vespasian’s and Titus’s master story of Jesus-Christianity (“Titussism”) and the coming of Domitian-centered Christianity. Revelation is a heralding of the coming of the new emperor whose goal was to dismantle the Titus archetype of Christ and replace it with Domitian and the Apostle Paul (“Domitianism”). The Roman rulers were apprehensive about telling the Plebians that Christianity was invented by the Roman rulers, so they desired to end the religion and morph it into emperor worship of Domitian. Atwill convincingly shows that events in the Bible occur not only in parallel with the Old and New Testaments, but in the same sequence. So, Joseph went to Egypt in the Old Testament and Joseph traveled to Egypt in the Gospel of Matthew; then the Pharoah massacred boys and Herod did the same; both returned to Israel, both passed through water, both were tempted in the wilderness, and both worshiped no idols, only God, all in the same sequence. So, the New Testament was taken from stories in the Old Testament. This busts any notion that the Bible is chronological. Joe Atwill says the Roman emperors wanted the Roman origin of Christianity implicitly revealed in the obscurant book of Revelation, so they could enjoy their vanity, their legacy, comic mockery and superiority over the plebians for fooling them. But there was no legacy unless they could openly disclose the origin of Christianity. This is what Revelation does. The Roman psychopathic emperors were like a pyromaniac wanting to be seen at the arson site, wanting their successful revenge latently known with the fantasy they would never be caught and punished because there was no god but themselves. The omitted assumption of the four theological interpretations of Revelation is that there is no separation of religion and politics. Revelation thus hides the secret religion of the maniacal and malevolent Roman oligarchs. Falsetti does not go beyond a sixth-grade surface understanding of what the book of Revelation is about. But such superficial interpretations provide certainty which apparently is all that counts. Falsetti’s book is for Certaintists, not skeptics, nor even faith-based Christians who believe in Revelation by sheer non-evidential faith alone (sola fide – by faith alone - not sola scriptura, nor sola historia, nor sola chronologia). Falsetti leaves out the viewpoint of the layperson and skeptical believer who regards certainty as a sin (see Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty, 2016; Peter L. Berger, In Praise of Doubt, 2009, and Peter L. Berger, Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity, 2004, and Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View of My Work: A Report to History, 1850). Evangelical Christians, however, are prone to compartmentalizing certainty and faith and don’t see any incompatibility when it comes to interpreting Revelation (see Robert Carroll, When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions, 1979). But again, Jesus’s admonition was “a person can’t serve two masters”. It’s as if we already are living in George Orwell’s futuristic novel “1984”, where “Newspeak” dictates that War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength; and now “Faith is Certainty”. Atheists say Christianity is conjured up and not revealed by God, but so is everything else. The American economy is entirely a fiction (see Jens Beckert, Imagined Future: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics, 2016).

I have always been confused about Revelations. This book broke everything down in a way that I could completely understand. I highly recommend this book for anyone that has any confusion of Revelations, but also, to those just looking for an amazing breakdown to read.

Revelation always seemed bizarre to me. I was fascinated by the imagery, but found it terribly confusing. Once I started to read this book, it made everything to much clearer. It's amazing how all the signs and prophecies fit together so seamlessly under this interpretation. Unlike the Futurist view where a single Antichrist will rule the world for 7 years, this view doesn't manipulate prophecies - it just interprets them as they were written. If you believe there will be a future Antichrist, you NEED to read this book.

Trying to understand the many different interpretations of Revelation myself only confused me more until I read 'Explaining Revelation'. This book, relying completely on God's word, made Revelation perfectly clear. As a Christian who has been both Catholic and Protestant at different points in my life, I found it heart, mind, and eye-opening. I truly feel this is a must read for people of any faith, or none at all, but especially for someone with a Catholic background like me.