Over the course of a couple of months we will take a zig-zagging tour through the book of Revelation, which features among this year’s Easter-season readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. We’ll take the lead from the RCL to look into Revelation but will explore it by a different route.

Getting ready for the series

Some easily accessible online resources

• Start with The Bible Project’s summary of the Revelation of St John: Part 1 and Part 2
• Then have a look at Dale Martin’s lecture

If you would like to do more in-depth reading around the themes of the book, one of the following would give a good introduction.

Standard commentaries include:

• ‘Revelation’ by M Eugene Boring (1989) is an accessible commentary in the popular Interpretation series
• Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s Revelation: vision of a just world is similarly readable, without too much scholarly technical apparatus to distract readers
• Unveiling empire: reading Revelation then and now is a thematic reading which gives considerable attention to modern and ancient contexts of reception of the book, as well as commentary on central texts

More thematic treatments include:

• An older, ‘sermonic’ but very readable treatment of Revelation is that of D T Niles, As seeing the invisible (1962)
• Jacques Ellul’s ‘Apocalypse: the book of Revelation’n (1977) is not your standard commentary but Ellul is always stimulating!
• Richard Bauckham’s The theology of the book of Revelation deals with the book thematically rather than verse by verse