نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
استادیار گروه ادیان ابراهیمی، دانشگاه ادیان و مذاهب قم
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
The Book of Revelation is a long dream or revelation experienced by St. John during his exile in Patmos Island in the Aegean Sea, according to the traditional view. John’s Book of Revelation is the only prophetic and revelatory writing in official scriptures of the New Testament. John’s Book of Revelation is highly abstruse because of its extraordinarily metaphorical language. There are four traditional approaches to demystify the Book of Revelation: retrospective, prospective, historicist, and spiritualistic. According to the retrospective approach, all prophecies in John’s Book of Revelation are historical facts. On this approach, prophecies in the Book of Revelation are expressions of events that took place in early Church soon after its writing. Moreover, the book is addressed to Christians who were suppressed in the first century by the Roman Empire and were disappointed of future political circumstances. The message of the book was that God was going to alter the circumstances and rescue the faithful from evils. Furthermore, the retrospective approach suggests that God’s covenant with Israel expired in 70, and then the Christian Church replaced the old Israel. In this paper, I outline the contents of John’s Book of Revelation and traditional exegetical approaches thereto, considering various components of the retrospective approach. I finally assess the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.
کلیدواژهها [English]