Anyone here a preterist?

[Taverner]

That is, someone who belevies that Revelation was already fulfilled in 90 AD, and spoke of the impending destruction of Jerusalem?

I've always felt this, and that the book was a coded warning from Roman Christians in the know to their counterparts in Jerusalem.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Makes more sense to me than what the fundies believe

Modern scholars tend to view Revelation as a coded encouragement to Christians who were beginning to suffer persecution. "Babylon" was a code word for "Rome."

[Taverner]

3. babylon=rome

My Grandfather (who was a Dutch Reformed Preterist) mentioned that, as well as 666 being Nero...I think it also references "Babylon" being destroyed by fire, which of course happened under Nero's watch...

And then of course the 1000 years of "Peace" but not such a great time (Pax Romana)

[hvn_nbr_2]

4. Babylon is more than a codeword for Rome. Babylon and Rome are the same.

Everyone who has studied Revelation knows that John borrowed a lot of symbolism from the O.T. book of Daniel. He uses some of that symbolism in a very delightful riddle (very Greek, that, but then Rev is a Greek book written in Greek) that involves some of the most gibberish-sounding stuff in Rev.

Here it is (working from memory, without my notes):

One of Daniel's prophecies concerns several beasts which symbolically represent successive empires that ruled over Israel. The beasts include a bear, leopard, lion, and something else. They represent, depending on the commentator, some subset of: Babylon, Persians, Medes, Greeks (Alexander the Great and his successors, the Seleucids), and Rome. Each beast represents a different evil foreign empire, and in the end Messiah comes and defeats the evil empire and restores Israel. That is the general nature of messiah prophecies from the Babylonian Captivity onward: he comes, defeats the current enemies of Israel, and restores Israel and establishes the kingdom of God.

So John takes that prophecy from Daniel and uses it in Rev. "The beast," which is really only one of several anti-christ-like beasts in Rev, has characteristics of all Daniel's beasts (leopard, lion, etc.). (This is key. Rev's one beast combines all Daniel's separate beasts into one.) This is the beast that suffers the mortal wound and yet mysteriously still lives. John also goes into a really gibberish-sounding riff about seven kingdoms, five of which have passed, one is, and one is yet to come. But then there's an eighth, which is "of the seven," but then there are ten more that arise.

Here's the kicker: If you solve the riddle embedded in all that, suddenly the gibberish reads smoothly and makes perfect sense, and the solution to the riddle makes Revelation stand out as a universal epic spiritual resource for the ages, instead of a parochial narrow view that "God is going to save my people/tribe/religion/nation and destroy our enemies." (BTW, as far as I know, you won't find this solution to the riddle anywhere else. I've never heard anyone else state it.)

The solution to the riddle begins with this observation: John combines all the separate beasts of Daniel into one beast. Voila! The many separate evil empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome are,in John's view, really all the same. They're all part of the institution of evil, oppressive empires and governments.

Way back when Babylon ruled over Israel, the messianic expectation was that messiah would destroy Babylon, end the Babylonian Captivity, restore Israel, and establish the kingdom of God. So when Cyrus (or was it Darius?) the Persian defeated Babylon, many people thought Cyrus was the messiah. But Persia turned out to be just another evil empire. So here is the next part of the resolution of the gibberish: The evil empire Babylon suffered a mortal wound and was destroyed, yet the evil empire lived on, in the form of Persia. Then the evil empire Persia suffered a mortal wound, and yet the evil empire institution lived on in the form of the Seleucids. Etc. etc.

So then John brings it all up to date, for his time: There are seven kingdoms, five have passed (Babylon, Persia, etc.), one is (Rome), and -- wait a minute, here's a major departure from all the other previous prophecies, messianic dreams, and apocalypic literature! -- one more is yet to come! This is John's first piece of very bad news on the evil empire front. When Rome falls, it won't be the end of evil empires. There will be another after Rome.

But then John has even more, bigger bad news: After the seven kingdoms, there is yet another, an eighth which is "of the seven," which I read to mean just like the seven or derived/descended from the seven. So even after Rome falls and even after the evil oppressor that follows Rome, there will still be another one after that, the eighth. But wait! There's more. The ten horns represent ten more kingdoms which must still come after that. So John says, essentially, forget about this happily-ever-after fantasy that messiah will come and suddenly save us all. Evil and oppression are going to go on a long time yet. This realization is necessary to the following events in Rev, which I won't get into now.

[Taverner]

5. Excellent! Thanks

Although I do also think there are some references to the torching of Jerusalem....and unfortunately I can't really back those up at this time :)

[hvn_nbr_2]

2. Sort of , but not in the conventional sense.

But first, a clarification: My understanding of preterism is that it means believing that "the Scripture prophecies of the Apocalypse (as in the Book of Revelations) have already been fulfilled." That quote is from http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=preterist
That means "already been fulfilled" from our viewpoint in time.

I don't think it necessarily means that it all was fulfilled before 90 A.D. although a lot of people think that some of it refers to the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D?). Most scholars believe that Rev wasn't written till about 95 A.D.

Anyway, Revelation itself says that the angel instructed John to (may not be the exact quote but this is the essence of it) "write in a book the things that you have seen, the things which are, and the things which must happen hereafter." That sounds to me pretty clearly like "past, present, and future," and it is obviously from the temporal viewpoint of John writing the book. So Rev itself says that anyone who thinks it's all predictions is wrong right from the start.

I'll say something more on this later, but don't have time to think it out now.