ABSTRACT
The word “blood” (haima) appears nineteen times in Revelation, including in depictions of Jesus as a slaughtered lamb, the holy ones as slaughtered beneath an altar, and prophecies involving blood pouring from bowls, cascading from heaven, etc. Unlike most modern readers in Western contexts, John of Patmos’s earliest audiences would have been familiar with the sensory experience of blood flowing. During rituals of animal sacrifice, most ancient readers/auditors would have seen, heard, and smelled liters of blood pouring out of animals’ throats, spilling over altars, and congealing onto the pavements of sacred sites.
This chapter draws on theoretical insights from Stuart Hall and scholarship on sensory experience to argue that John’s representation of blood encoded his audience’s perceptions of animal sacrifices as a form of Roman violence against the holy ones. This encoding reproduces aspects of the imperial hegemonic discourse, as localized in the visual culture of Roman Asia—namely, it centers the roles of elites in sacrifice while obfuscating the labor of enslaved and low-status people. At the same time, it engages in a “negotiated decoding” that emphasizes the bloodiness of animal slaughter in opposition to the concealment of blood in the dominant visual culture.
