The view of the Book of Revelation in the Bible held by most Christians is that it is mysterious and hard to understand. Yet, the simple fact that it was a revelation means it must be easy to understand. If we can not understand it, then it is not a revelation, it is a mystery.

If we are going to understand the book of Revelation, we must know when it was written. The historical context is important when understanding any book of the Bible. To understand what the writer is saying, we must interpret it as the original audience would understand it.

What was going on in the world at the time? I take the view that revelation was written about the year 65 AD, not my private view. There’s a whole body of scholars who take this view. There’s only two views, one that it was written in 65 AD, one that it was written in 95 AD. If it was written in 95 AD, that would put Revelation under a rather severe, but brief persecution, by a Roman Caesar named Domitian. This view comes from the writings of Irenaeus, the second century church father. He makes a somewhat ambiguous statement in his writings “Against Heresies” in which he implies Revelation was written in 95 AD. That has become a view held by many. It based largely on Irenaeus testimony. Based entirely on a vague writing, outside the Bible, this has become the popular view.

There are a very robust and significant number of scholars who take the view Revelation was written in 65 AD. This view is based both on internal and external testimony. So we have two views: one based on minimal external evidence and one based on internal and external evidence. Personally, I put a great deal of value on internal evidence, letting the Bible interpret the Bible.

Author and scholar Kenneth Gentry wrote his doctrinal thesis on the evidence for the early date. This research is available in his 478 page book “Before Jerusalem Fell”. This puts Revelation under the reign of Nero and the persecution launched by him only the prior year.

What are the primary concerns in Revelation? It’s a book celebrating transition. It’s a transition from Moses and the Exodus that took place with Moses to a greater Exodus and a greater Moses. You may recall chapter 14 where a vast multitude is standing beside a great sea singing the song of Moses. The Moses Song is the Exodus song.

Revelation 18:4 “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” That’s an Exodus motif. The whole book is filled with that sort of Exodus idea. God’s people escaping from a place where God’s wrath is going to fall, but because they follow his instruction, they escape that wrath. It’s a book of transition from an Old Jerusalem to a New Jerusalem. You know the end of the book celebrates the New Jerusalem which implies that there must be an Old Jerusalem. The Old Jerusalem is called “the harlots city.” Why? Because that Old Jerusalem had committed treason against her covenant husband, it had crucified his own son. It had murdered the prophets. Jesus says, “it’s impossible for a profit to die except in Jerusalem,” Luke 13:33. Jerusalem was the city that had turned its back. “We have no king, but Caesar,” was the cry of the crowd when they stood there at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, and this is a book that celebrates the transition from the old to the new. It celebrates a transition from the old creation to the new creation. “Behold, I make all things new“ is the announcement of the voice from the throne in Revelation 21:5. That theme runs through the book again and again, a time of new creation.

The back story of this book is the mounting campaign against the city of Jerusalem that culminated in 70 AD and when the city was wiped out by the Romans under Titus, the son of Vespasian, who eventually became a Caesar himself. We don’t quite appreciate the cataclysmic proportions of that, but what if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and read the paper and here that the city of Hong Kong or the city of London or the city of New York or some other great city that belongs to the world had just been wiped out overnight? Can you imagine the shock wave that would go around? That’s precisely the proportions of what happened when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. This was a major center of the world. Huge wealth was in that city. It was a central venue for commerce, for trade, for travel, for tourism, all of these things. Jerusalem was a major city, an important center of commerce and it was wiped out overnight.

At the same time, there was a comparable cataclysm that was happening in Rome. It made many people think it was the end of the world. Tacitus, the Roman historian, thought so. He tells us, he thought the whole thing was collapsing right here, right now. This was unbelievable. We have forgotten because we don’t know that much about history, but at the time this was one of the most cataclysmic events we can imagine. That’s the backstory of what’s happening in this book. The destruction of Jerusalem radically reshaped the Jewish religion. It had always been a religion tied to a temple. Now it had to redefine itself as a religion without a central sanctuary. The Old Testament presupposes a temple that is now gone, and so the Jewish religion looks very different from this point on, but by the same token, the Christian religion did as well because it had also been tied to the temple.

Read the New Testament, and you see again and again illusions to the temple and Christian people resorting to the temple. Now all of the sudden the temple is gone and that made the Christian movement also untethered, freed from a geographic venue for worship. The New Testament tells us there is now a living temple. Christ is its cornerstone. We are, as Peter says, “living stones” constituting comprising this temple. Instead of making a pilgrimage now to the temple, the temple is making a pilgrimage to the world. Go into the world, Temple, and preach the Gospel. Make disciples of the nations so that the whole world becomes the temple. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Matthew 18:20. You don’t need to go somewhere to find me. I’m with you. Wherever you go. It’s the temple with wheels on it, and this new paradigm you’ll see for God’s people was really only possible once the old temple was removed.

So what happened?

“And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not,” Revelation 17:9-11.

The Angel says, the seven heads are seven mountains or hills. The city of seven hills is Rome. That was a common nickname for that city in the first century. It continues to be a common nickname for it to this day. Well, if the city is Rome than the kings by ordinary estimates would be the five Caesar’s that had ruled up until this moment.

Who’s the first Ceasar? Julius Caesar. Some people don’t want to include him because he was never quite a king, but in the first century it was commonly assumed he was the first Caesar. Suetonius writes in the early second century, a book called “The Twelve Caesars.” He starts with Julius Caesar. This was the way people saw it, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that the Book of Revelation takes that view. Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. He is the catalyst. The defining moment was in 49 BC when he crossed the Rubicon and said famously “the die is cast” and launched his campaign against Pompey in the Senate. This would essentially remove the Senate from its power and make it more of an honorary or titular sort of title. He was assassinated though, as you know, on the ides of March 44 BC. His nephew Octavian, took over a few years later after an interim, sort of an intervening period of triumvirate, period, and he beginning as Octavian, was given the name Augustus.

We read of him in the New Testament. It was Augustus Caesar sent out a decree that all the world should be taxed. He’s the one that’s ruling at the time that Jesus is born. He defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s forces at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. He reigned from 31 BC to 14 AD. He’s probably the greatest, most talented of the Caesars. He’s the one that created what’s commonly called the Pax Romana. He says, famously, “he found Rome stone and he left it marble.”

The face of Rome in Israel at the time was Herod. Herod the great, but Herod and the six descendants of Herod. It is a beast with seven heads and 10 horns. Rome was constituted by 10 provinces cobbled together and a great empire, but in Israel it was a seven headed monster known as Herod, and so this Herod who was a friend of Augustus Caesar, plays a role in the Book of Revelation, especially chapter 12.

“Five have fallen.” Third of those Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius Caesar was the nephew and adopted son of Augustus. Augustus never had a son of his own. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37. He wasn’t as showy as Augustus. He was a more pensive man. Some regarded him as kind of dark and brooding, but he was more or less a quieter sort of fellow. It’s in his 15th year, Luke tells us that John the Baptist came on the scene and began preaching a message of repentance to the people of God that’s recorded in Luke chapter three. Jesus’ ministry began about that time and went until the year 30, so it’s under Tiberius that Jesus is active in Israel. The resurrection, the passion, the ascension, all of this takes place in the spring of 30 AD, the first nine chapters of acts take place under Tiberius, including the conversion of the Apostle Paul, interestingly, and not very well known, Tiberius apparently believed that Jesus was deity.

I’m not saying he was a Christian believer or any such thing, but he had enough evidence at his disposal to have made an interesting proposition to the senate. This is recorded for us by Tertullian. Tertullian, an early church scholar and apologist, wrote a defense of the Christian faith called the Apologeticus, the apology. He writes these words describing Tiberius, “unless the gods gives satisfaction to men, there will be no deification for them. The God will have to probe a propitiate. The man Tibor serious. Accordingly, in whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world, having himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ divinity brought the matter before the Senate with his own decision in favor of Christ the Senate because it had not given the approval itself, rejected the proposal, Caesar held to his opinion threatening wrath against all of the accusers of the Christians. Consult your histories.”

This is Tertullian, writing to the politicians of his day to go back and look at the archives and convinced themselves that Tiberias himself with some kind of believer. A commentator on this name, Cleveland Cox, noted “great stress is to be placed on the fact that Tertullian was a Roman lawyer, familiar with should it be with the Roman archives and influenced by them in his own acceptance of divine truth. It is not supposedly that such a man would have hazarded his bold appeal to the records and remonstrating with the Senate and in the faces of the emperor and his colleagues had he not known that his evidence was irrefragable.” In other words, this man is commenting that Tertullian would not, as a Roman lawyer, be so stupid as to appeal to an archive that didn’t exist, so we have this interesting little picture of Tiberias as at least a sort of distant or quasi believer in Christ.

The fourth of the Caesars, five have fallen, the fourth of them is Gaius Caesar or otherwise known as Caligula. Gaius took the throne in 37 AD. He was quite competent for the first six months. He was a protege of Tiberius, and then he got some kind of fever that was called brain fever. He came out of it a mentally unstable. For the next three years, his behavior was bizarre and destructive. And finally, his own body guards took his life in the year 41. He reigned for three and a half years, bringing us to the fifth of the five Caesar’s that has fallen.

That is a Claudius. The conversion of Cornelius in the New Testament took place under Caligula. Claudius the fifth of these reigned from 41 to 54 AD. He is most famous for conquering Britain where Roman had a Roman presence for about 300 years. During his reign, Paul engaged in his first and second missionary journeys. And the council of Jerusalem took place in 50 AD and recorded in Acts chapter 15.

He was poisoned, however, because he began to distance himself from his stepson, Nero, who had become his stepson by virtue of his marriage to Agrippina his fourth wife. And so the lovely and charming Agrippina poisoned him.

Five have fallen. One is. So presumably we are now at a time during the reign of Nero when this particular document is written, Nero’s the sixth of these. He reigned from 54 to 68. His early career was benign because he was only a teenager and all he wanted to do was go out and vandalize Rome. He was more or less dominated by three characters who were very sensible managers of the state.

Seneca, the stoic philosopher, Burris, the head of the Praetorians and Agrippina, his mother. Nero began to repudiate sane council. He had all three of these counselors executed, including his mother. The Apostle Paul. who had spent two years in jail in Caesarea was transported to Rome and was held there for a couple of years, from 61 to 63 AD.

Nero had still not turned started his persecution of Christians. However, in 64, there’s a great fire in Rome. The fire destroyed a third of the city. About two days later, Nero trotted out blueprints that had already been prepared as to how to rebuild that part of the city and he was going to rename it Neropolis, or Nero’s city.

The Roman people suspected Nero had caused the fire in order to execute this grand plan. Nero realized he was in huge trouble and in the moment of distress, he blamed the Christians. He said the Christians started that fire. And thus in the summer of 64, this huge persecution is launched against Christian people. It is an imperial assault that begins and continues for about the next seven years. It starts in 64 AD.

Paul was not in Rome at this time. Quite possibly, he was in Spain. Paul was eventually arrested along with Peter. They were executed in Rome in about 66 or 67 AD. John was exiled to the isle of Patmos about the same time. Christians in Rome tended to be killed, while Christian leaders, especially throughout the empire, tended to be imprisoned or exiled, and that’s what happened to John.

The Jewish Wars broke out about that time, and what began as a campaign against Christians morphed into a campaign against Jewish people, especially in Jerusalem. Nero didn’t distinctions at that point between Christian people and Jewish people, and so it kind of transformed itself. Nero himself was executed by the Roman military in 68 AD.

Josephus tells us about the Jewish wars. There had been rising tension in Israel for some 20 years. Israel was becoming increasingly divided between liberals who wanted to find common cause with the Romans represented by the Sadducees class and conservatives represented more by the Pharisees. Even more division was caused by the zealots who were beginning to appeal for a radical revolution against Rome. The abuses of Rome were only exacerbating the situation.

Much of the abuses were from corrupt procurators or governors in Jerusalem. Pontius Pilot was one of these procurator. Others came later who were even more corrupt. The last of those curators was a man by the name of Gessius Florus. He ruled from 64 to 66 AD. He pushed Israel to the boiling point. He stole money from the Temple Treasury. He gratuitously killed about 3,600 peaceful citizens in a five month reign of terror. Most of this information comes to us from Roman historians, especially Tacitus.

These actions inspired a revolutionary response from the zealots. The revolt broke out in 66 AD. It forced Herod Agrippa II, the man before whom Paul appeared, to flee to Rome. This brought Cestius Gallus He was the governor of Syria. Cestius Gallus came down and laid siege to Jerusalem in 66 AD trying to put down the revolt. For reasons that remain completely mysterious to this day. He left after six days. He had bottled up Jerusalem and he withdrew.

The zealots capitalized on that as a show of weakness and chased out after him and actually defeated him in a surprise attack at the battle of Beth Horon. This discredited the moderates in Jerusalem and the radicals took control of Jerusalem.

At that same time, Christians remembered what Jesus said. We get this information from Eusebius, the church historian. Eusebius says that Christian people remembered Jesus’ words, “And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto,” Luke 21:20-21

These Christians looked out, they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies and they said, “how do we flee to the hills? There’s armies out there.” Then for no apparent reason, the armies left and the Christians, every last one of them left town. They went to the southern Judean wilderness and they holed up there. The Christian people escaped the horrific savagery that was unleashed on Jerusalem over the next several years.

Nero appointed Vespasian to quell the uprising. Vespasian arrived in 67 AD with 60,000 elite troops. Vespasian did not attack Jerusalem directly at this point. Instead he attacked rebel stronholds throughout Galilee and finally overran Jodapatha, resulting in the death of most of its citizens. It was a bloodbath. Scorched earth. The Sea of Galilee was floating with bloated bodies. It was a horrific slaughter, so that many thousands of Jewish people fled to Jerusalem for safety and the city was swelled with an overpopulation.

Jerusalem itself then became the involved in civil war between the people who wanted to peace with Rome and those who wanted to carry on the assault.

The campaign against Jerusalem was cut short by what’s called The Year of the Four Emperors. Remember, “five had fallen, one is, the other is not yet come, but when he does come, he will remain for only a little while,” Revelation 17:10. After Nero was executed in 68, his successor was a man by the name of Galba. He reigned for less than two months. He was was assassinated. He was replaced by Ortho. Ortho ruled for three months. He was assassinated, replaced by Vitellius. He ruled for about eight months. He was assassinated. He was replaced by Vespasian.

The world was watching at this. Can you imagine if we had rapid-fire assassinations in the United States? What kind of turmoil it would create, and that’s exactly what was happening in Rome. People thought this is it. This is the end of the Roman Empire, possiblty the end of the world. There was general despair across the entire world, the known world at that point. Jerusalem, on the one hand and Rome the other, were both on a meltdown situation.

The fall of Jerusalem took place in 70 AD. Vespasian went to Rome to take control. He left Titus, his son to handle the mop up operation there in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was put under siege in April. It fell in starvation conditions only five months later. The reason they ran out of food so quickly is that the zealots burned up all the food they could have survived several years. Instead, they couldn’t make it several months. There washorrific, unspeakable cannibalism. One mother even cooked and ate her child.

The worst possible imaginable famine conditions were the experience of those who were in Jerusalem until finally the city fell in. In late August, the city was destroyed. The temple was burned. Over one million Jews were killed and many, many more sold into slavery.

I think there’s pretty good evidence that that is the historical background to the Book of Revelation.