Adela Yarbro Collins. The Book of Revelation: An Introduction

Wikipedia:

Adela Yarbro Collins (born 1945) is an American author and academic, who served as the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. Her research focuses on the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Revelation. She has also written on the reception of the Pauline epistles, early Christian apocalypticism, and ancient eschatology. 

Collins’s work has focussed on Apocalypticism, the Book of Revelation, and the Gospel of Mark. Among her many books Mark: A Commentary (Fortress 2007); Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of Apocalypse (Westminster, 1984); and The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Harvard Dissertations in Religion 9; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the Harvard Theological Review; reprinted Wipf and Stock, 2001) stand out as major contributions to the field. Collins is considered one of the pioneers in understanding apocalyptic literature in Judaism and Christianity and her commentary on Mark has been called a “landmark in Markan scholarship.

Google Books:

For the first time in complete form, the results of recent analyses of the Apocalypse are presented in a way that is easily understood by the beginning student and challenging to the scholar looking for a fresh approach. In a clear and vivid manner, Adela Yarbro Collins discusses the authorship of the book of Revelation, when it was written, the situation it addressed, the social themes it considered, and the psychological meaning behind apocalyptic language.

An excerpt from, “Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse” By Adela Yarbro Collins, Westminster John Knox Press, 1984, Pg. 35 – 36; 44 – 45:

One of the first to discuss the social situation of the book of Revelation was Carl Clemen. In 1927 he published an article arguing that the work represented a small circle of Christians with specific ideas and attitudes that distinguished them from the main body of the church. He apparently came to this conclusion by way of analogy with modern sects. In support of his thesis, he argued that the nature of the symbolism in the book shows that it was written for a small group with specific ideas. He believed that the presentation of the beast, for example, as arising out of the abyss, indicated that what the beast represented was to come in the future. But, he argued, the beast represented Rome, and Rome already existed in the writer’s time. He concluded, therefore, that the symbols of Rome were included because the author wanted to present a complete summary of the last things. He was constrained to do so, because of the expectations of his readers. Since so the argument goes-most Christians would not have held such a complete summary to be indispensable, the book must have been written for a small group. Clemen also argued that the anti-Roman stance of the book reflected a minority opinion.

Clemen’s reasoning about the symbolism of the Apocalypse is by no means cogent. It was not unusual for apocalyptic symbols to represent past as well as future events. Consider, for example, the vision of the four beasts coming up out of the sea in Daniel 7. Each of the beasts is related to one of a number of kingdoms, all of which were already in existence at the time the vision was written. Perhaps Clemen intended to say that all apocalyptic symbolism was esoteric and intelligible only to a few. To some degree, apocalypticism was a learned phenomenon. But that does not mean that the apocalypses were intelligible only to a few. The great effort needed to understand them responsibly today is due in large part to the fact that the modern reader must reconstruct the historical situations in which they were written and read, and must recover the connotations of the traditional symbols.

. . .The fact that John wrote in his own name and claimed to have received divine revelation does not prove that there were community prophets active in one or more of the congregations. The notion that there were people who received divine messages was familiar to anyone who had read or heard of the Israelite prophets or who was familiar with analogous phenomena in the earliest church or elsewhere in the Greco-Roman world. The activity of “Jezebel” and perhaps “Balaam” shows that the phenomenon of prophecy was alive in the region at the time. But there is little if any evidence that John’s allies in the seven communities included prophets. The references to prophets discussed by Nikolainen and Hill (10:7; 11:18; 16:6; 18:20, 24; and 22:6) could be interpreted entirely in terms of the classical Israelite prophets. After all, early Christians believed that they had prophesied the events of Christ’s life and work and the other last things. It was assumed by early Christians that many, if not all, of the classical prophets had been martyred; see, for example, Matt. 5:12; 23:29-39; Luke 11:47-51; Acts 7:51-53. Finally, John did not distinguish between the Jewish people and the Christian church, between old and new covenant. This becomes especially clear in ch. 12. Thus he could treat the classical prophets as part of the one true Israel. But even if these passages include Christian as well as Jewish prophets as Hill argued, it does not mean that any of these were active in John’s time in any of the seven congregations. As Ulrich Müller has well pointed out, the references are very general.

The social location of John, author of Revelation, was taken up in a recent article by David Aune. He noted that John never referred to himself as a “prophet,” but implied that he played that role by de-scribing his book as a “prophecy” (1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19). Further, John came very close to designating himself a prophet when he attributed the following words to the revealing angel in 22:9: “I am your fellow servant, and the fellow servant of your brothers the prophets.” Aune interpreted this remark as evidence that John was a member of a prophetic circle or guild. He found support for that conclusion, as did Hill and Schüssler Fiorenza, in 22:16 (“I Jesus sent my angel to witness to you [plural] these things about [or for] the congregations”). He concluded that John, like “Jezebel,” belonged to an association of prophets found in many if not most of the seven congregations.

Video Title: Adela Yarbro Collins. The Book of Revelation: An Introduction. Source: Лаборатория Ненужных Вещей. Date Published: November 24, 2019.