Life Goes On? Temporality, Resistance, Excess: A response to Lynn Huber’s and Gail O’Day’s Commentary on Revelation

Firstly, and most importantly, I want to congratulate Dr. Huber on this fantastic achievement: she has published the most learned, lucid, and comprehensive commentary on Revelation that I have ever had the privilege of reading. The commentary is a tremendous accomplishment that should and indeed must define the study of this book for generations to come. Thank you, Dr. Huber.

Secondly, I want to thank Dr. Huber not only for this volume but for her work in general. Publications such as Like a Bride Adorned, Thinking and Seeing with Women, “Pulling Down the Sky,” “On the Edge,” “Gazing at the Whore,” “Sexually Explicit” have shaped the field.[1] Even before this commentary, it was impossible to read or think about Revelation without reading and thinking with Lynn Huber. And rightly so. The commentary builds upon, supplements, and expands an already rich repertoire of reflections upon, interpretations of, and interventions in contemporary as well as ancient receptions of Revelation, a book which cannot, does not, and will not let us — our culture, our students, our guild, our imaginations — go.

With this in mind, I would like to focus on three interlocking themes that Revelation, this commentary, and the commentary genre in general raise for me: 1. Temporality; 2. Resistance; and 3. Excess. Both commentary and apocalyptic eschatology are intensely interested in timing: they want to know and say something about when something happened, happens, or will happen (then, now, later). And, once that when is determined, how to manage the timing properly. The present is out of whack and both the apocalyptic visionary and the commentator seek words capable of bringing a better world into sharper focus. Both the commentor and visionary are therefore interested in resisting a present malaise with symbols and mysteries, facts and evidence, and/or images and words that can be, well, excessive.

Temporality, Resistance, Excess

In March 2020, when, for the sake of survival, all of us were told not to return to our classrooms, I happened to be teaching an undergraduate course I call “The End of the World.” Though not focused exclusively on the book of Revelation, John of Patmos’s visions and their receptions offered a kind of refrain that we returned to, again and again. About two weeks into the pandemic, as it was becoming clearer that we would not be returning to our classrooms, cafeterias, libraries, and dorm rooms anytime soon, we dropped everything and, instead of following the syllabus wrote a manifesto. At the center of that manifesto was an insight my students attained with the kind of sparkling clarity that, I imagine, visionaries like John of Patmos enjoy: the opposite of an end is not a beginning but a continuity. As they put it:

Continuities, not beginnings, are the counterpoints to “the end.” What dies provides the provocation and the nourishment for what must and will continue to live. There are no beginnings that begin from nothing.

I take their insight as a provocation to imagine continuities with and through the book of Revelation and this outstanding commentary on it. John of Patmos may have resisted chrononormativity somewhat — Huber argues this point convincingly — but his rhetoric also works to lift the veil on the future and obtain a vantage point from which viewers can be invited to perceive the present through what is to come so that they will respond before it is too late.

The biblical commentary addresses the present too, but from an entirely different vantage point. Where apocalyptic eschatology looks to the future to address a misperceived present, biblical commentary has looked to the past to correct a misperceived text. As Johann Gottfried Eichhorn argued in his Einleitung ins Alte Testament (1780-1783), one of the earliest examples of the modern commentary genre, it is the task of the biblical scholar to “pronounce sentence after separating, from internal evidence, what belongs to different authors and times.”[2] By doing so, the critic has to give up some of his most dearly held textual desires, but what is gained in terms of accuracy and clarity is worth the loss:

He who blames a Biblical scholar, or even sighs with pious apprehensions, when he beholds him instituting with critical precision and judicial severity an examination into each book of the Old Testament…such a person must be either altogether unacquainted with antiquity, profane literature, and the usual mode of dealing with it, or be…entirely destitute of strength of mind.[3]

Real men, Eichhorn implied, must face the past with discipline and vigor, even if that means giving up false hopes like the wish that Moses is the true author of the Pentateuch. The solution, then, is rupture with the in-between time and rescue of the long last past, despite the human folly that has nearly destroyed everything in between. This is a stance I’ve called “textual nostalgia.”[4]

These eighteenth-century philological rules shape the commentary genre to this day. Modern commentaries like Dr. Huber’s therefore customarily begin with an introduction that places the text in some past by attending to who wrote the book, where the book was written, when, and to whom, as if specifying points of origin capture meaning in some vitally important way. As participants in what is now a centuries-long literary tradition, feminist commentators have also been constrained by the custom of articulating present meanings by excavating facts, evidence, and words in their “original” contexts. The book jacket states the goal plainly: “In this commentary, Lynn R. Huber situates Revelation and its earliest audiences in the overlapping worlds of ancient Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and first-century Judaism.” Placing Judaism and Turkey at the center of the interpretive agenda shifts meaning in crucial ways, but the past retains its significant pull, as the “translation matters” boxes, images of Roman reliefs and coins, and references to, for example, the Roman economy, ancient marriage customs, and ancient sex-work emphasize. Still, this is a feminist commentary; philological and historical matters are therefore insufficient. The jacket copy continues: “She examines how interpreters from different generations living within other worlds have found meaning in this image-rich and meaning-full book,” a promise that is fulfilled, repeatedly and gloriously, by other boxes and word-studies like “Jezebel and Sexual Violence,” images of a medieval illumination with the face of the Great Prostitute rubbed out, and discussions of figures like Rebecca Cox Jackson, an AME preacher and founder of a Shaker community in Philadelphia. Those seeking a commentary that conforms to historical-critical expectations about authorial intention, sitz im leben, and grammatical investigation will not be disappointed — this commentary contains all that and more — but, unlike Eichhorn, Huber does not demand that her readers break with past or present loves. Instead, she asks us to read with our loves in mind and, through our affective attachments, to listen more deeply to the voice of John of Patmos, which may be loved or resisted, as well as a chorus of voices that have been ignored, silenced, or drowned out.

Dr. Huber has therefore given us a new kind of commentary and a new kind of eschatological vision more in line with my students’ insights than with either John of Patmos or Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. Though this Wisdom Commentary on Revelation mines the past for useable truths for the present and considers contemplation of the future as an invitation to greater understanding, like my students, this book places its gaze squarely on the now, asking us to look and to know. In Huber’s work, John’s visions are both a resource for feminist work and a formidable block to that work, as they pile up the baggage of kyriarchal domination on the backs of everyone who accepts the book’s authority. To borrow a metaphor from the conclusion, Revelation is like a meandering river that seems to move forward, but spills over, changes its banks, and cuts canyons with its scoldings, blessings, warnings, and affirmations. Working against genre and within genre in ways that hold fast to feminist and queer commitments but by using all the tools in the philological, narratological, and historiographical toolbox, Dr. Huber’s commentary is especially welcome. The present is very much out of whack! And some combination of critical analysis, practical performance, and imagining otherwise may be our only hope. I find that I am constrained by continuities that I may not want and rupture is not actually an option (sorry Eichhorn) but, by claiming those that I do want and finding a together and a we, the river may yet shift or even change direction. I’ll let my students from my 2020 course have the last words:

Since there are always ends (deaths, destructions, shutdowns, changes) and also continuities, living on involves both a shared recognition that everything will end, including us, and a shared desire to live on in a world that is bigger than any one person, group, or nation. Confronting an end-in-process with courage and hope rather than mere acceptance is part of our shared work.

[1] Lynn R. Huber, Like a Bride Adorned: Reading Metaphor in John’s Apocalypse (New York: T & T Clark International, 2007); idem, “Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs, “ Cross Currents 68.2 (2018): 283-308; idem and Tom Mould, “On the Edge of the Apocalypse,” Cross Currents 68.2 (2018): 207-215; idem, “Gazing at the Whore: Reading Revelation Queerly,” in Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (ed. Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone; Atlanta: SBL, 2011), 301-320; idem, “Sexually Explicit? Re-reading Revelation’s 144,000 Virgins as a response to Roman discourses,” Journal of men, masculinities and spirituality 2.1 (2008): 3-28.

[2] Translated with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel in their edition of F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 229.

[3] Ibid, 230. 

[4] Jennifer Knust, “On Textual Nostalgia: Herman C. Hoskier’s Collation of ‘Evangelium 604’ Revisited,” in The Future of New Testament Scholarship: From H. C. Hoskier to the Editio Critica Maior and Beyond (ed. Garrick V. Allen; WUNT 417. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 79-102. 

Jennifer Knust is a Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, Director of the Elizabeth A. Clark Center for Late Ancient Studies, and Co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute Manuscript Migration Lab, she studies early Christian texts, their contexts, and their multiple receptions.