ABSTRACT
The Bible ends with a final image of Jerusalem, the summing-up of the achievement of God’s city that had begun with Abraham. The Revelation is a strange book, written for the persecuted churches of western Asia at some (still disputed) time between ad 70 and 100. It was plainly written in a time of persecution; the most favoured date places it c.ad 95, when Domitian (81–96) was trying to destroy the Christian Church because (unlike other religions) it would not accommodate itself to Emperor-worship. The author is fully competent in Greek, but writes in a special style strongly laced with Hebraisms, which do not translate into English. The peculiar quality of his imagery, fortunately, survives any translation.
