Book Review
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Mardie MacDonald Fund
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A History of the End of the World - How the most controversial book in the Bible changed the course of Western civilizationMost compelling thought:The Book of Revelation sucks. It has sucked for 1900 years and it will suck for many more, unless an unforetold meteor strikes or a pandemic, or G.W. Bush and Osama do something inconceivably stupid, because stupidity is what the entire wretched world has in common! The only one who has ever said anything clever about Revelation is Jonathan Kirsch, whose readers subsequently show all the signs of everlasting sophistication. |
Buy this book for:
People who love to get angry about lame pseudo science, but who also have a thorough understanding of the material at hand. This book is certainly not suited for the beginning Revelation enthusiast.
Jonathan Kirsch
Jonathan Kirsch is an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property in Los Angeles. He is also a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and Adjunct Professor on the faculty of New York University.
A brief review of:
A History of the End of the World
There are few things as sad as reading a study of something you really love (and sometimes, in your sweatiest dreams, believe to understand some) by someone who is clever, eloquent, in reach of a monstrous library of references, up to spank with all kinds of relevant political issues, and completely void of any respect for his subject.Jonathan Kirsch hates Revelation. And he lets us know that many of the church fathers also disliked it. Augustine warned against a literal reading. Luther warned against the absence of the Christ whom he thought he knew from the other NT works. And then, of course, there are the many wackos who surfed the crest of Revelation onto the shores of madness and mass murder. Kirsch urges his readers to study Revelation because it 'is still embraced by men with the power to destroy the world,' hence arguing the absurd idea that Revelation could propel what it seems to preach: the end of the world.
And if that isn't enough, Kirsch states, "As a work of prophesy, of course, Revelation is wholly and self-evidently wrong." The world, after all, hasn't ended and we haven't seen any multi-headed beasts rise and romp about the earth, and this while Jesus states that He is coming soon and we are to wait a mere little while (Rev 3:11 and 6:11). Then Kirsch writes, "John makes it clear that the names, numbers, colors, and images in his visions are ciphers that must be decoded to yield their actual meanings," which then lets a naive Revelation-lover such as myself wonder whether Kirsch figures that he has successfully subtracted the 'actual meaning' of Revelation and may pass his certainty about Revelation's failures freely and without any resemblance to the 'delusion' he accuses the book's fans of.
Kirsch is well researched but not in the least curious about Revelation. He spews his gall from page one and evokes every slander that Revelation has had to endure (from the various other apocalypses to Rapture Theology to Hitler and the Left Behind series) and then some: Revelation, he asserts, is part of the great human tradition of dupe that counts among its professors the babbling oracle at Delphi, the Bible Code researchers and every other schizoid who hears voices and repeats them.
Here at Abarim Publications, we disagree.
And although we are always duly respectful to yet another commercial success, we recognize the semi-academic ranting of the great human tradition of dupe which is also home to writers like Dan Brown and the Baigent-Leigh team.
The book of Revelation is certainly one of the most colourful and challenging books of the Bible but it is by no means a coded message that needs to be unravelled. Just like any other text, Revelation is a symbolic entity whose elements play their part on a certain, specific stage (like this article that you are reading is a symbolic entity set on the stage of English prose). If a reader is not on that stage himself, he may read anything from incoherent nonsense to a completely differing message.
Revelation gained its position in the Canon not by being wild and mad but by fitting neatly onto the rest of Scriptures. Its message is as-is and can be largely understood not by the rest of the apocalyptic genre but by the rest of the Bible (just like the communion ritual can be understood by the rest of the Bible and not by studying cannibalism). Revelation's mysteries are vast but no more than, say, those of the Ten Commandments or the crucifixion. John the Revelator (whomever he was in addition to being the author of Revelation) achieved the monstrous task of firstly enduring his visions without becoming permanently cataleptic, secondly of transliterating these abstractions into a popular human language and into a consistent whole, and (thirdly) meticulously on par with the symbolic vernacular offered by the preceding Scriptures. This article is not meant as a commentary on Revelation, but just to give a hint: in Exodus it reads that Moses built the tabernacle according to patterns he saw in heaven (which makes Moses the first published Chaos Theorist). The tabernacle subsequently evolved into the temple, which in turn grew out into the body of Christ. The book of Revelation talks much about that body of Christ and thus utilizes much tabernacle items, like the lamp-stands, the trumpets and the 7 & 10 couple. Kirsch does not recognize these things but rabidly lists the reflections of fellow blunderers like Barnum did his human oddities.
And while we're at it: A History of the End of the World is a clear example of sloppy bling-writing. Apart from its relentless lashing out at something greater, it is riddled with poor editing: redundancies, repetitions, irrelevancies, psychotic conclusions and plain old typos. Words like 'poignantly,' 'ribald' and 'conflagration' occur far too many times, and so does the phrase 'fear and loathing' (at least 6 times). Is this awkward and inappropriately frequent use of the same big words perhaps a trace of a code that Kirsch is hinting at? Is he perhaps hiding secret information in his book that we need to unravel? The phrase 'fear and loathing' was of course made famous by Hunter S. Thompson and the good Doctor himself once wrote:
"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." (HST, Generation of Swine, introduction).
But where Thompson was a living satire on everything including himself, Kirsch obviously desires to be taken seriously and - dare we say? - literally, and that does him in. It would be a cold day in the bottomless pit if this clown were ever to try his hands at the maddening intricacies of relativity theory or quantum physics. Begone Jonathan Kirsch! Go sell crazy somewhere else. Here at Abarim Publications, we're all stocked up.
