In Our Time - The Apocalypse

Episode Date: July 17, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Apocalypse. George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as “the curious record of the visions of a drug addict” and if the Orthodox Christian Church had had its way, it would never have made it into the New Testament. But the Book of Revelation was included and its images of apocalypse, from the Four Horsemen to the Whore of Babylon, were fixed into the Christian imagination and its theology. As well as providing abundant imagery for artists from Durer to Blake, ideas of the end of the world have influenced the response to political, social and natural upheavals throughout history. Our understanding of history itself owes much to the apocalyptic way of thinking. But how did this powerful narrative of judgement and retribution evolve, and how does it still shape our thinking on the deepest questions of morality and history? With Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; Marina Benjamin, journalist and author of Living at the End of the World; Justin Champion, Reader in the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as the curious record of the visions of a drug addict. And if the Orthodox Christian church had had its way, he would never have made it into the New Testament. But the Book of Revelation was included,

and its images of apocalypse from the four horsemen to the whore of Babylon, were fixed into the Christian imagination and its theology. As well as providing abundant imagery for artists from Dura to Blake, ideas of the end of the world have influenced the response to political, social and natural upheavals throughout history. Our understanding of history itself owes much to the apocalyptic way of thinking. But how did this powerful narrative of judgment and retribution evolve, and how does it still shape our thinking on the deepest questions of morality and history? With me to discuss the apocalypse our Justin Champion,

reader in the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London, Marina Benjamin, journalist and author of Living at the End of the World, and Martin Palmer, theologian and director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture. Martin Palmer, first of all, how would you say the apocalypse was? The apocalypse is essentially a vision of the meaning of history, and as such it encapsulates about a thousand years of thought from around about the 8th century BC through to the 1st century AD, of thinking that history now had a significance and a purpose.

Prior to that, you have a notion of history as cyclical or just epochs that roll on, but with the coming of the prophets within Judaism and the idea that there is actually a significance to world events, and this particularly happens with the exile of the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century BC, you begin to have the notion that history is being driven by a force. You also have the idea that there was a good time, a golden time, the Garden of Eden or whatever. Now we're in a bad time and eventually it will get so bad that a new world will break through. So you have a linear concept of time which is hugely powerful still to this day.

Why do you think that came about when it came about and where it came about? Was it a Western European thing or did this start to happen all over the world at about the same time? No, it is predominantly arising out of the Jewish theological. which came from persecution. In particular, it begins to take shape when the Jews in the second century BC were being hammered, literally, by the Greeks, and everything they stood for was being attacked.

In particular, they were trying to observe the Sabbath, and the Greeks quickly worked out that if you were trying to wipe out a Jewish garrison or town, you were attacked on the Sabbath, because if they were good Jews, they wouldn't attack back. And so the whole question arose as to why on earth were those who were fulfilling the law actually paying the ultimate price for it of death. And so you begin to get essentially a really rather nasty strand

arising within religion, which is vengeance. And the notion that God is actually going to come and smash the evildoers, grind them into the ground. But it wasn't only happening in Judaism. There were similar trends arising within Chinese thought at the time. There were millenarian movements around the time of Christ and into the first and second centuries AD in China. But they were very swiftly crushed.

What is so fascinating about this fringe philosophy of vengeance and end of time is that through the book of Revelation, which many feel should never have got into the Bible, Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence says it's the least Christian book in the Bible, and then goes on to say, but it's had more effect than all four Gospels. Because that book got into the Bible and was given authority, It has run as a strand, quite often an underground strand, throughout Western history since, in a way that it has never done, for instance, in Chinese thought.

Well, that's a great start. That's terrific. Marina Benjamin, do you think that these ideas of salvation and final judgment were born out of... Can we just talk about more specific incidents in Jewish history? Martin has given us a big opening there, but he put it very clearly into the Jewish strand of thinking and their history. So can we just rummage around there for a little while longer? Well, that's quite right to do that, to trace Apocalypse's roots to Judaism.

You could trace them back further to Zoroastrianism, which I'll come back to in a minute. But the apocalyptic narratives, the vision that Justin was talking about, had precursors in a more standard kind of prophecy called prophetic eschatology, which was born around the time of the exile to Babylon, where you had prophets who were contemporaneous

with the exiles like the people responsible for writing the book of Isaiah, for example, who were predicting a grand return of the Jews back to the homeland of Judea. And this would involve a simple kind of vengeance, you know, crushing the enemies. The motif, the leit motif, if you like, for this, was the exodus.

Here again, God would intervene in history, smashed down mountains and beat a path of return for the Jews to go back to their homeland at the same time. He would make quite sure that the enemies were sort of beaten down in the process, sort of blood-curdling, a spy, chilling torches and destruction. This was a sort of precursor of apocalypse,

and this was to give reassurance and sustenance and faith to a dispossessed people in exile. That was the literature. It was a literature of salvation and a religion of comfort. The interesting thing about prophetic ascotology is that it put rather too much faith in history. So what you had was this persistent problem beating the prophets down,

which was history kept disconfirming their predictions. as time passed, what they said would come to past did not happen, or if it did happen, it happened in a much less grand way. And so what you have with the development of apocalypse is you have a narrative of God's saving acts that's removed from history into a realm of symbolic archetypes. So you have a kind of cosmic vision where the saviors become angelic warriors,

where your enemies are demonic hosts, and the graphic types are sort of larger than life. and at a remove from history. That's gone into that part very well. Were there any precursors? Or anything happened before that had a bearing on this? Zoroastrian thought you have ideas of alternating periods of light and dark followed by a period of light, a renewal.

I think there were currents of thought in ancient religions that were based on the idea of salvation and the idea that history, that passage through time had an ultimate destination, a purpose. Just in Champion. Do you think this is, just to look at it very basically, connected with our own lifespan, that there will be an end, there will be putting out of light, and the narrative is the narrative of our own lives, written large,

written into religion, written into metaphysics? I mean, I think one of the fundamental problems that this form of religious literature attempts to sort of answer is exactly what will happen. Human beings are deeply, deeply anxious about the future. If you're suffering persecution, if everything you have, hold as sacred and valuable is being destroyed by figures that you might regard as anti-Christian or satanic, you need meaning. And I think the book of revelation gives some sort of meaning to that human experience. I think we also need to sort of underscore in one sense that the apocalypse

works with the Bible as a whole. There's an entire description of human history and sacred history from the creation to the last judgment. What the apocalypse does is, is place you, the reader. And I think that's one of the points people often forget. The book of Revelation is composed to be read, not to be preached from. It's a book of sort of individual's encounter, rather than a thing that you use to exhort people to do things. So it fixes you in a particular narrative,

and that gives you meaning, if you believe it. How did the Book of Revelation come about? Can we talk about... Do we have any real evidence? I said in the trail, John of Patmos about 90 AD. I've read, many of you know, some of you know, it says 70 AD, some people say it was several people and so on. Can we have a go at that?

If we went back to the 19th century, I think it's Vischer, argues that it's a Jewish apocalypse and that some Christian has forged and interpolated a bit of Christianity into it. It's not a unique book. There are many, many other apocalypses, both Jewish and Hellenic, Apocalypse of Peter, the book of Enoch, the 12 patriarchs. Somehow this invagled its way into the canon in the third, fourth century.

Apocalyptic writing is revelation, it's prophecy. It's the Greek word, isn't it for revelation? Was it not thought for a while that the author of the book was the son of the apostle, the John, the son of Zebedee, the Apostle John, which would have explained why it might have scraped into the canon. It was actually thought to be written by John, the beloved. That's the only basis on which the author of the apostle. Church accepted it. With great reluctance, and to this day the Ethiopian Church still will not use the book. And

in the Orthodox tradition, it was never read aloud. You were forbidden to read the book of Revelation or to paint any scene from it until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which they saw as a precursor of the coming of the Antichrist. But it was strongly opposed. It was not easily accepted. Just for one second, before we go on, can you, Justin, just give people to remind them some idea of what is in

the book of Revelation good Lord praise it all that well why is it well let's assume that everybody has a working idea what is it that has made it a book of

such impact such continuing interest such attraction to artists scholars thinkers men of faith men without faith women of course what is it about it then I mean, I think the first and most powerful thing to say about it is an incredibly fantastic literature. I mean, it's written, it's full of emblems, it's full of allegories, it has powerful descriptions of haws of Babylon, dragons, deep monsters from the ocean, lambs.

There's a sort of binary opposition between the goods and the dams between the sort of saved and Babylon against Jerusalem. So it's a piece of literature that you can find pretty much, whatever you want in it. It also gives a very powerful, if occluded at times, narrative of how the world has got to where you are and where it will go. And there's a very complex sort of systems of vials being emptied, trumpets being blown, seals being opened, riders of the apocalypse, lambs being saved. It's gripping. If you believe this book is telling you about the future and the past, and you believe it's a revolution.

revealed and sacred. You've got to read on and you've got to work out what it means. We never quite nailed who you three, one of you, thought, did write it. Martin, how you do? Oh, the tradition is it's John the Divine, the beloved disciple of Christ, which is the only reason it got into the Bible. But almost certainly it was written by an exceedingly disgruntled exile on the island of Patmos, who was a minor figure in the church, and who did what was quite standard in those days, which is if you were writing a slightly suspicious book

and you wanted to ensure that you got good publicity, you claimed it was written by someone much, much more famous. So it wasn't a con as such. It was just a literary device at the time. But he appears to have been a Christian who'd suffered under the renewal of persecution at the end of the first century AD, somebody who comes from Asia Minor

because the churches that he lambasts are all the churches in what is now Turkey. And he is a very, very, very, disgruntled gentleman. He's not a very good scholar either, isn't it? No, he's not. His Greek is... Well, I think your point, Justin, that it is a dramatic

read. It's like the fact that it's really second-rate novels that make the best films. And that's a classic example of what the Book of Revelation is. It is it's pulp fiction. It's an early airport novel. But it's wonderfully impenetrable, which I think is part of its

enduring appeal, because this idea that it contains secret knowledge And so it appeals to those who feel that they're somehow initiated to adepts. And it's called forth everybody's fantasies. If you look at the earliest printed Bibles, really from 1,500 onwards, and Justin will know this for the Civil War period, you've got the rest of the Bible with kind of the odd footnote here and there. Then you get to the book of Revelation,

and the actual text of the book of Revelation is about sort of four lines. And then you've got wages of commentary all around it, as each person comes up with their own. and as you say, it sparks whatever you want to fantasize about. I think one of the things to sort of emphasize is that it's drenched in Old Testament sort of language. So if one is widely read in the Old Testament and other parts of the New Testament and then encounters revelation, you can see the connections. And this sort of feeds into this almost gnostic desire to penetrate the veil. I want to move this on just a bit.

Two things happen in the light fourth century, which seemed to me to be significant, before we try to push on it. One was the Emperor Constantine became a Christian, and the Roman Empire became Christian, and Christianity from being several, quite a number of different sects, often with different practices, speaking different languages, began to unify as one, as the faith of the empire.

And secondly, the New Testament began to be put together as a book. It's been mentioned several times I read in this programme, how on earth did the book of Revelation get in? Your expression more than mine. So how did he get in, Justin Champaign? It was the decision of a church council. It was a human decision that these, the Book of Revelation, along with another whole set of Old Testament and New Testament text

that we're all very, very familiar with, would now become the revealed word of God. It's slightly more exciting than that, than that, there, wasn't it? I mean, it was a human decision, but what actually did happen was they put all the books that were thought to be possibly canonical underneath the shrine in Constantinople at the conference there, shut the doors,

prayed to the Holy Spirit to reveal which were the true ones, and when they opened the door the next morning, the real books were on top of the saint, and the other ones were underneath. Now, I mean, that's the story. So I think Justin's right, but I think we should bear with the fact that in a sense the church knew these books

were so controversial that they had to come up with a divine intervention to justify them. Yeah, I think in one sense, Christianity, as it becomes an institution, as it becomes an orthodoxy has to pare away texts that compromise or threaten that orthodoxy.

And from the end of the 4th century, really, there's an attempt to really define what is the truth. I think what's interesting in a cultural context as well is that you must remember at the time when Apocalypse entered the canon, the church was still a revolutionary body which wanted the overthrow of the imperial power that was sort of squashing it down.

Then, later, when it became the ruling authority, the religion of empire. It didn't want to condone a theology in which stipulated that it should be passing away with the death pangs of the last age. I think that's really important to underscore in one sense a lot of the apocalyptic literature up to the 3rd 4th century

regards imperial Rome as the Antichrist. Once Constantine has become a Christian emperor, Rome is a slightly more problematic figure. And ever since the church has a very uneasy religious. relationship with apocalypse. Absolutely. I mean, you find that in the Civil War period, the reason for choosing 1656 as an apocalyptic date is that they take the date when Christianity became an official religion of the state

and say, that is when Antichrist started to reign. They take the 126, sorry, 1, 260 days, which are years in the Book of Revelation and say, ha-ha, so that brings us up to here. So when the apocalypse began to resurge in the, in the, in the, the, you know, the Reformation, they saw the conversion of Constantine as the beginning of the Antichrist. Martin, can I ask you, Martin Palmer, can I ask you at the beginning of the 5th century? St. Augustine of Hippo wrote the city of God. And he, in a way, internalized the apocalypse.

What effect did he have on apocalyptic thinking and how long did his effect on us? Well, I think it picks up exactly on Marina's point, that essentially what had been acceptable beforehand and really rather exciting, which was the sense that you were a group that could overthrow the principalities and powers of this world has to shift. And what Augustine does, interestingly, is he does two things. First of all, he does get rid of any concept that you can work out the date. He says, forget that. And he really puts a cap on it.

And as far as mainstream Christianity is concerned, with one exception, Joachim of Fiore in the 12th century, he puts the cap on official speculation by the church. It's the reformation that opens up the can of worms again. There is an exception to that in that he does, he hints that the formation of the church was the beginning of the millennium, and so you have this time bomb. Well, he does, but he says, but he then internalises that. He says that actually it is the individual conversion that brings about the kingdom. And in a sense, he is right.

I mean, if you look at the teachings of Christ in the Gospels, it is that the kingdom of God is here now. Well, that was the first saving of faith. Oh, it was certainly helped, let's put it that way. But I think the other thing that he does, which in a sense I think lays a bigger time bomb under Christianity, is that he introduces a thoroughgoing dualism. He introduces the notion that this world is evil. It is spiritually incomplete. It is a corrupt world.

He had been a Manichaean, which comes from the Zoroastrian tradition. Zoroastrians had introduced this notion of absolute good and absolute bad to Judaism. Manichaeism in the second third century had been a real challenge. to Christianity. He was a member of that. And he brings in this notion. Yes, he gets rid of the sense that the apocalypse is round the corner and we can work it out. But he sets up an absolute tension between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

And we are currently, in his theology, on the side of evil. Martin mentioned Jericho Fiori there, Marina Benjamin. Could you briskly tell us what this 12th century monk brought to the table? Yes, what he brought to the table was a sort of tripartite division of history into three ages or dispensations, the age of the father, the age of the son and the age of the spirit. There had been previous apocalyptic divisions of history consistent with the idea, for example,

that the world was 6,000 years old, analogous to the six days of creation, and there'd be the seventh day. And there are others, but I won't go into them. The thing about Yoakim was it was much simpler. Three ages, three dispensations, three acts, a nice parity with beginning and end. And of course, he saw himself,

as being the equivalent of the figure of John the Baptist in the second age, which was inaugurated by Christ. Here there would be a third age of love and peace that would be inaugurated as he saw it by St. Benedict. His writings were probably the greatest uncondemned heresy in the Catholic Church, and that they actually call for the overthrow of the Catholic Church. And the church only wised up to it after Yoakim's writings were taken up by a counter-Catholic, sects and used to attack the church.

So people like John of Palmer and various commentators who were sort of identifying St Francis as the new, the founder of the new age. The spiritual Franciscans. Yes, that's right. And Yo-Hakim's idea of the third age was very similar to the idea of the millennium. I mean, it was the idea that, you know, that we, he said actually we would live as spiritual bodies and we would live in voluntary poverty and we would desire nothing and it would be an age of kind of peace and harmony.

So it was a sort of Catholic gloss, if you like, on the millennial. Justin Champion, how is the idea of the apocalypse brought to the forefront during the Christian debate at the time of the Reformation? What happened to apocalypse then? I think one of the sort of larger narratives that we've been talking about from the shift in the early church to the medieval period and then the Reformation is that in the pre-fourth century church, millinarianism is about changing society.

It's something physical, real. It's social and revolutionary. Post-Augustin, the sort of millennialism has become a spiritual concept, an individual question of how your soul will be saved. With the Reformation, with the expansion in particular vernacular Bibles, everybody who can read can start to encounter and try and interpret, we get the sort of rediscovery, although there are sort of traditions in the medieval period,

that do attempt to reform society. through the Agency of Revelation. With the German Reformation in particular, John of Leiden, Thomas Munster, we have individuals who see revelation encouraging and exhorting them to change the world as they see it. And not to change it in a reformist way,

this isn't sort of Blairite millinitarianism. This is fundamental social revolution, community of property, polygamy, destroy the world, as you know it, to usher in the last eight years. in the role of Christ? Would it be true, or would be too crude to say that apocalypse until then had largely been thought of us,

something that would happen to you. The world would come to an end, it would happen whatever you did. You were passive in this process. And come the Reformation, come the Protestant thinking, the individual reading of the Bible, the individual relationship with God is thought that, it ceased to be passive, it became active.

You could welcome it because you'd be ready for it, and when it came you would be able to take advantage of it. I think that's the fundamental shift. I mean, the legacy of Augustine is you don't know. You suffer. You're a pilgrim on the way to your last judgment. You have no role in deciding what happens to you. With the invention of a sort of Protestant conscience,

you can't be passive. You have a duty to be active to resist the Antichrist. It is your active duty to go out there and do something. Although at the beginning of Protestantism, the beginning of Reformation, there was a great deal of suspicion about the book of Revelation, and with it came a great deal of suspicion about Futurology. It was really disdained.

Luther thought it was absolutely not on. And the early apocalypse is like the apocalypse of John Fox was about martyrdom and continued that vein of passivity. And very interestingly, regarded the millennium as being in the past, that was something that was started with the church and then they saw themselves as the persecuted that lived just before the end of time. And that changed.

There are two or three competing ideas in, if we can maybe just unravel them before we go on. One is that there will be the same thing, second coming. And the other is that the final fight between good and evil at Armageddon, which is a place in the Middle East, will result in the elimination of evil. And the other is that the effect on the people who are not fit will be damned forevermore. Are these three things still going on at the time of the Reformation, not in Parliament? I think they are because, I mean, one of the interesting things about the Reformation and Marina's touched on it is that the leadership

was deeply suspicious of these ideas. They wanted people to read the Bible, but they wanted them to read it as they read it. And one of the phenomena of apocalyptic thinking is that it is essentially a poor and a working class movement. It has always been the justification for social rebellion amongst the people who felt most dispossessed. And that is still the case today.

You'll still find that it's used as a revolutionary tract by the poorest of the poor. And in a sense, they weren't too bothered about which bits of it they used at any given time. It was a jolly useful device for, in a sense, feeling that those of you who had least control over the world actually knew more about what was really going on than the people who were in control.

And I think that is the power of the apocalypse and revelation, is that notion that you and you alone, your group, actually understand what is going on. You know what's going to happen. You can read the signs. And that is a... compensation for the lack of actual power? Was there a sense, Justin Champion?

I know you want to get in Marina, but can I just ask this question? That in the civil war in this country, there seemed to be a harbinger who were a forked taste of the apocalypse because two mighty things happened. The head of the church was executed. God's appointed head of the Christian in this country. And then the head of the state, the man who ruled by divine right, was also executed.

that must have seemed what did it seem did it seem this proves that an apocalypse will happen or did they think it had happened or what? That sort of cataclysmic event equivalent in one sense

in sort of shattering cultural certainties as the planes going into the twin towers it's almost impossible for us to think how dangerous the moment this was convinces contemporaries that they are living right on the edge of prophecy they are in end times and one of the whole sort of traditions

of post-Reformation encounters with Revelation is it's about trying to match up the stories and the plots and the narratives and the symbols in the book of Revelation with what's going on. But why is this book still pulsing in so importantly?

Because increasingly, I keep thinking of those sort of kids' toys where you line all the arrows up and then you can see different things through the holes. The holes look convincing. The Pope is doing particular things. This is the third, you know,

crown of the apocalypse, the fourth vial has been thrown. I think we need to remember there's a vast amount of scholarship. I think what we're taking for granted in this discussion, which perhaps hasn't been made clear or explicitly stated, is that the people who believe in apocalypse identify with the characters in the book of Revelation. So that if you're a Protestant being persecuted, you are the just who will see, you know,

power and glory at the end of the day. Your enemies will be smitten by, you know, the returning Christ. That's a wonderful thing about Lawrence's book. an apocalypse. These men in their pulpits in the north of England denouncing their enemies and they've been suppressed but everybody's going to be slain by what they say. It's really vicious. It's deeply gratifying if you are having a rough time. It arises out of persecution and it

thrives on persecution. Well, D.H. Lawrence was such an interesting character in this regard because while he was poured scorn on this idea of kind of Christian, mealy-mouthed Christian Democrats, he called them Pat Mossers He talked about the religion of the self-glorification of the week with its millennium of pseudo-humble saints and he said, you know, if you have to suffer martyrdom and if all the universe has to be destroyed in the process, still, still, still, oh Christian, you shall reign as a king

and set your foot on the neck of the old bosses. And yet, yet he saw himself as the Messiah and he saw the great war as the great pause of revelation and he had this Yo-Hakeem idea of, you know, three ages, of love, law and comfort. and it illustrates the power that the Book of Revelation holds on the psyche. I mean, I think that that's the key thing going back to the 1640s. If God has allowed your king and your archbishop to be killed,

he has to be telling you something. He has to be. And with a lot of the sort of sectarian groups, the Fifth Monarchists, they believe if they don't act, if they don't start striking down the evil and the sinful, the rich, they're all soldiers, they will suffer, they will be damned. And I think, again, it's very, very difficult for us to get into that mindset and recognise these aren't lunatics.

This is part of the mainstream Protestant culture. You said Martin earlier that it appealed to the poorest of the poor and Marina said, identified we are the just, and we brought in Lawrence of the men in the chapel, the black end of chapels are going to get the bosses and so on. And yet it attracted the greatest intellects that there were. we have Newton writing literally millions of words on the idea of Revelation, the book of Revelation,

clearly believing in it passionately, setting a date 2016, it's still a hell of us, for the end of the world, this, this, and so it has that intellect, why can you explain, Justin, about that sort of intellectual satisfaction? Attraction, I mean, sorry, intellectual attraction. I mean, I think again, you know, we've got to sort of grasp that scripture is something, it's a hand,

book that tells you about not only how the world works but how the future will work. And for people like Newton, Locke and a whole range of other contemporary sort of intellectuals, that's the fundamental of their belief. They believe this book, if understood correctly and cleansed of its corruptions, and Newton's very keen to make sure that only the best bits of the Bible are the ones that he reads, will tell you the truth. And from the Reformation onwards, there's a whole literary technology to explore exactly the meanings, concordances, biblical indexes.

Martin talked about the sort of incredible annotation. John Lightfoot's commentary on Revelation runs to a thousand folio pages. Joseph Meade, a book that's written in the early 1620s, is stock in everybody's library. Newton uses it. He even provides a neat sort of fold-out diagram that explains how it all works. How Revelation works. How it matches up the symbols to the history.

and you can then read off what's going to happen. Logarisms, for example, are designed by John Napier, not to help children do maths, but for him to be able to calculate the number of the beast with absolute accuracy. So I'm cautious of using the word, but it's a science, it's a knowledge, and they are rigorous in their explanations, I think. As you say, you know, the premise of taking this so seriously

was one that it was believed that it was the literal truth, And two, as Newton explained, and various other commentators had thought before him, the language of prophecy was understood to be amenable to rational analysis. It was a rational language. So what we now regard as high allegory, you know, beasts and whores and, you know, this incredible drama of theatre of war was taken absolutely literally by someone like Newton. Well, I think also there's the thing that if you read what is supposed to be the signs of the end of time, you can apply it to any generation you're in.

you know, people being unfaithful, murderers, bad politicians, etc. Any time is susceptible to being seen through the mirror of the apocalypse. What effect on thinking did the discover is wrong, the encounter with America and the American Indian being there? What effect did that have? Because I know it had an effect, so it's a phonive question. Can you tell us what the effect on the matter? Gosh, that's a very good question there, well.

Well, a fundamental effect. One of the things that is not known largely about Columbus is that in 1501 he wrote a book called the Book of Prophecies, and he saw the discovery of the Americas as a fulfillment of part of the Book of Revelation. One of the great enigmas for scholars throughout the medieval period was what had happened to the other 10 tribes, because the Book of Revelation makes it absolutely clear

until the 12 tribes are able to, surrender up there 12,000 martyrs who will be the ones who go into the new world, there can be no end of the world. And these ten tribes have disappeared off the face of the earth. And then suddenly you discover an entire new world. A world which is populated by tribes that nobody's ever met before. Bingo, we've discovered the ten tribes of Israel. You then get a reaction against that.

So that kind of underpins. That's why you have the Dominican. and the Franciscans and the Benedictines going out there to convert and then being so horrified and fighting against the slavery and the wiping out of the tribes because having only just discovered the ten tribes, the fact they were then being wiped out by the Spaniards through disease and murder was, you know, you were undoing the apocalypse.

There is a very powerful apocalyptic tradition behind the opposing of the brutalities in the new world. But the sense that this is a new world of promise, a place where the sins of the past can be put aside and you can actually create the new world is then fed by the Protestant tradition of going out and founding numerous jerusalems and other such cities.

But then you begin to get a very interesting reaction back to Europe in language that Rumsfeld has used recently, which is the notion that old, tired, corrupt Europe is now the Antichrist. Or if it isn't the Antichrist, it's the breeding ground of Antichrist. and therefore America begins to get this notion that it is destined for some greater purpose. Can you tell us how important apocalyptic thinking was in 19th century America

to the drive of America's discovery of itself just in China? I mean I think the opening up of the West is driven in one sense by a whole sort of evangelical sort of tradition. Mormons. Mormons, an entire variety, too many names to. sort of even remember, rather than even say, who again use the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Book of Revelation to sort of justify their exploration.

And you get an explosion of small evangelical groups, communities. And I think, again, it's moved away from the individual to a community who are confronting a little bit, perhaps, like the early Christians, difficulties. The Book of Revelation and Apocalypse gives meaning to struggle and to suffering. In terms of its theology, it's about patience and courage. That's the main sort of, once you've prophesied the return of Christ,

you as a believer have to behave with courage through suffering. But you threw up some extraordinary figures. Marina Benjamin, William Miller was worn. Let's just stick with William Miller, who led, one's led to believe, in 1843, the end of the world, and thousands and tens of thousands of people followed him. And then we're told from, well, then we're not talking about people who are very, susceptible. Well, we're not talking about

farmers, we're talking about hardworking, presumably hard-headed descendants of Scots-Irish out there, new how to dig hard soil and make it. But they followed him and waited for it to happen. It didn't happen. He said he got the wrong. It happened next year. They did it again.

Even more of them. And it didn't happen again. So can you just describe that about it? Well, I think to understand the power that William Miller's prediction have, you kind of have to understand that one of the keys to revelation is mathematics, mathematical mathematics, the idea that there are mysterious numbers embedded in the text that somehow provide a timetable for the end of the world.

Now, William Miller was far from unique in nominating dates. I mean, Justin, through the Civil War, people were nominating one date after another, almost annually. But 1843 was the date that he attracted a great deal of publicity for because he presented as a personal conversion, a revelation that he'd had, and he went about recruiting followers, much as an evangelical preacher would, almost like a daughter or salesman. At one time it was estimated that he had 50,000 followers. What becomes a bit difficult in retrospect is to see how,

well, because the failure, which was known immediately as the great disappointment of the world ending in 1843, the great disappointment, immediately got swept up into American folklore of sort of Millerites waiting on mountaintops, you know, in white ascension robes, waiting for the kind of second coming to happen and the world to end. But more interestingly, the legacy that it left history was that it sparked the beginning of 7th, Adventism because many of his followers refused, and this is absolutely classic of millinarian groups, to be disheartened by failed prophecy.

And you simply assume you got the numbers wrong, you did the maths wrong, or you identified a historical event badly, and you go back to do the number crunching all over again, and you continue with your apocalyptic faith. Is this something to do at the kernel of this, Martin Palmer, is this something to do with this wonderful phrase, sacred time? Yes, it is because it is about purpose. It is about purpose. It's ultimately about purpose.

And I think one of the... What is sacred time? Well, sacred time is the notion that there is a definite beginning, which happens for a purpose, and that is creation. And in a sense, whether it's six days or billions of years is irrelevant, it is a purposeful beginning of time. History is directed. It is moving towards a certain goal.

And you find that thinking gets into evolutionary thinking, that, you know, everything is getting better. And this informs a huge amount of social philosophy, socialism, Marxism, throughout the 19th and 20th century, the notion that history is inexorably moving towards a better world. And this utopia, apocalypse, tension is one that, to this day, shapes social policy of socialist parties around the world. And the notion is that ultimately the world will get better.

It may have to go through the most terrible time. but at the end it will be better. And the intriguing thing is that if you take Schweitzer's understanding of the role of Christ, he sees Christ as throwing himself against the wheel of time, that Christ's sacrifice is to break the power of time. Ironically, the apocalypse undoes that, and actually, I think, rolls over Christ. Almost Christ is ignore.

The Christ that we can find in the Gospels is almost totally. ignored by the apocalypse in favor of, as Marina was saying, a futuristic, militaristic, vicious ruler. So I would argue that the sacred time, the Christian understanding in the Gospels is that time is individual. The apocalypse is that it is societal. Can the three of you, as we come to the end of this program, difficult to throw in words like end in it. Can you say how you think apocalyptic, thinking where, what place, if any, does it have in the thinking about our society today? Would you like to kick off, Marina?

Yes, I was going to talk about the way in which Yo-Hakim's ideas of a tripartite division of time have actually moved into secular thought. So you have, for example, the stone, iron and bronze ages of the archaeologists, or you have the golden, silver, bronze ages of speculative mythologists, ancient, medieval and modern kind of tripartite division of history. Carl Marx, primitive communism, class society and then a communist millennium. August Comte, the scientific positivist, had theological age, a metaphysical age and a scientific age. And so basically, we still, my argument is really that we still see time in apocalyptic terms.

What about you, Martin, do you see the word apocalyptic being applied to events and thoughts now in any sensible way? I think the use of the word sensible and apocalyptic is almost contradictory, sadly, but I I do see it. I work a great deal with the environmental movement and ecologists. And frankly, were it not for the apocalypse, most of them would be speechless. I mean, literally, if you look at the way in which social movements, like the environmental movement, try to shock us into taking seriously what they're saying, it is so rooted in the apocalypse. And in, well, in two things, really, it's rooted in the apocalypse,

and it offers us either a vision of the whole world going up in flames and all the language is derived straight from the apocalypse. Or in the slightly nuttier groups who think we should all return to being Native Americans or whatever, it's a utopia of total primitive harmony again. And the environmental movement, I think, is a deeply, deeply apocalyptic movement, which is probably why it's not going to work.

Justin Champion, finally. I mean, I think as a historian reflecting on contemporary society, we're still in end times. One only has to look at the sort of higher elites of American politics and movements like the Christian Coalition, all sorts of very, very strange and deeply worrying sort of projections onto the state of Israel to see that for many powerful influential figures, George Bush, for example, is regarded as the Antichrist.

As a historian, one would hope that if we delve into the past and see how this text has driven all sorts of positive ambitions and all sorts of absolute disasters, that we ought to learn something. I mean, it's an irony to me that one of the best-selling novels in Italy that's just been translated is Luther Blissitt's Q that, of course, is set exactly in this sort of apocalyptic German Reformation with projections of community of property.

This is a best-selling novel. Well, let's leave it on those happy words, best-selling novel. Thank you, Marina Benjamin Benjamin, Justin Chairman, and Martin Palmer. That's the last program in this series. We'll be back in October, and you can brood on the fact that Newton said 2016 it'll all be up, and that was Isaac Newton.

Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.