Jitterbugging for Jesus

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who is seated upon many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; 5 and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations.”

— Revelation 17:1-5

A 1523 woodcut by Hans Burgkmair, for Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, depicting the Whore of Babylon riding the seven-headed Beast

The book of Revelation uses two major, complementary images of the evil power of Rome.

One is the sea-monster (‘the beast’)… the other image is the great city Babylon, first named in 14:8, and then portrayed as a woman, ‘the great harlot’, in chapter 17.

“Babylon is the city of Rome.”

— Revelation scholar Richard Bauckham in the 1993 book The Climax of Prophecy

A clergy friend of mine who grew up in a rural fundamentalist Baptist church in Arkansas once told me that members of the hometown church believed the Methodist Church was “the great whore of Babylon” referred to in Revelation 17:1-18.

“Where I grew up,” I noted when he told me this, “the fundamentalists used to say the whore of Babylon was the Roman Catholic Church.” Which is true: some of the more backward Christian thinkers in rural Texas back in the day were extremely anti-Catholic (and I have no doubt that some of the more backward home folk still are).

“Yeah, but our town didn’t have a Catholic Church,” my (now very progressive) Baptist friend said, grinning. “We only had a Methodist Church and it was close enough to Catholicism to be the great whore.”

So goes the silly nonsense that Revelation has stimulated for too long in the minds of backward Christians who believe the book was written as a prophecy predicting the distant future.

But then, even the Catholic-turned-protester Martin Luther–not exactly a silly, rural Texas or Arkansas boob–wrote in “the Babylonian Captivity of the Church”:

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The letter John of Patmos wrote to seven churches in Asia Minor was written to encourage first-century Christians living under brutal Roman rule to stay strong and keep the faith. Life was hard for those Christians because of their allegiance to the true God as opposed to the emperors in the line of Caesar who were considered to be God–and who expected to be worshiped as God.

In Revelation, a “whore” (or “harlot”) was the ultimate symbol of evil, idolatry and temptation. In John’s symbolic language, Rome was “Babylon,” a city awash in paganism and idolatry. Even Peter apparently used “Babylon” as a code name for Rome (1 Pet 5:13).

John with his metaphors and symbols was urging the Christians not to sell out their souls to wealth and surrender their allegiance to Caesar’s Babylon. John was urging them to remain true to Jerusalem, the true city of God.

For a detailed outline of the symbolism and various interpretations or Revelation 17, I commend to you an online source by Dr. Brant Pitre that you can link to here.

As for today’s takeaway:

20. In Revelation, the “whore” symbolizes evil and idolatry and Babylon is Rome. John was urging Christians in “Babylon” to stay faithful to God and not to give in to the Empire’s temptations.