National Geographic: Riddles of the Bible - First Season

Banished to a cave, a persecuted man has a vision.

He sees the end of time,

the return of a gentle Christ turned merciless warrior.

Plague, disease, holocausts,

oceans of blood, wicked beasts,

and a brutal Judgment Day.

Believers go to heaven.

Unbelievers are sent to a bottomless pit of fire.

This is John's revelation, the final book of the New Testament.

And millions believe his apocalypse is near,

that we are the last generation before the end.

I think we are Iiving in the twiIight of human history.

Those who have rejected God and have Iived seIfish Iives,

they're cast in the Lake of Fire.

It's gonna be horrendous.

Was John foreseeing the future of the human race?

Plotting a revolution against an evil empire?

Or was he a man on the edge of insanity?

The Book of ReveIation has been the brutaI book of the BibIe.

It basicaIIy scared the heII out of us.

Why does this ancient book still haunt us?

Can we unlock the secrets of Revelation?

Negative. FB-1 30, code 4.

You guys have a safe night.

Jesus Christ! What the heII is that?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

lt's written war and disease follow in their wake.

Soon after their appearance,

the wicked will be punished with eternal damnation.

The righteous will be saved with everlasting life.

The Book of Revelation.

lt is both a horror story and the promise of a paradise soon to be.

Everybody is afraid of the end of the worId.

Everybody is intimidated by the end of the worId. What's gonna happen?

Worldwide, there are two billion Christians.

Many believe the Book of Revelation is a precise blueprint for Jesus's second coming.

ln the United States, 55 per cent of adults believe the Bible is the word of God,

without error, to be read literally.

Most peopIe think that the Book of ReveIation

is a prophecy of what's going to happen in the future.

For beIievers, it remains an absoIuteIy contemporary text,

just as reIevant as the morning newspaper.

I'm convinced that God meant us to take it IiteraIIy.

If you don't take it IiteraIIy, you can't understand it.

If you can't understand it, you can't be bIessed by it.

The book was probably written about 60 years after Jesus's crucifixion

by a man named John.

His revelation came in a series of dream-like visions.

Many of these images are, to this day, seared into the popular imagination.

John sees an angel, a messenger sent by God.

A voice speaks.

''Come up here and I wiII show you what must take pIace after this.''

John finds himself before God.

God holds a scroll fastened shut by seven seals.

The scroll contains God's secret plan for the future.

John weeps, for he cannot open the scroll.

A sacrificed lamb appears.

This is Jesus.

The lamb opens the first four seals,

unleashing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

They bring war, disease, famine, and death upon the earth.

The fifth seal raises dead martyrs.

The lamb opens the sixth seal.

The sun grows black, the moon turns to blood.

Earthquakes destroy cities.

The seventh seal brings a half-hour of silence,

a pause before the wonders and horrors to come.

John sees angels carrying trumpets.

Each trumpet blast ushers in worse terrors.

Hail, fire, and blood rain upon the earth.

Forests are destroyed, the oceans become blood.

Monstrous locusts attack any human without the mark of God on his forehead.

And I heard an angeI fIying through the midst of heaven,

saying with a Ioud voice, ''Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth.''

Two hundred million warriors on horseback swarm across the globe

and destroy one-third of mankind.

A beast appears.

lt is all that is evil.

A woman John calls the ''whore of Babylon'' comes forward.

And I saw the woman drunken with the bIood of the saints,

and with the bIood of the martyrs of Jesus.

John sees Jesus vanquish the whore.

And then on the plains of Armageddon,

Jesus and the armies of Satan fight the war to end all wars.

Christ the lamb becomes Christ the warrior.

He defeats Satan and casts him into a burning lake.

Jesus rules on earth for 1,000 years,

destroys Satan for all time,

and then judges all who have ever lived.

Revelation ends as a new Jerusalem descends from heaven.

And God shaII wipe away aII tears from their eyes,

and there shaII be no more death,

neither sorrow, nor crying.

For nearly 2,000 years,

John's Book of Revelation has haunted mankind.

The effort to decode the symboIs in the Book of ReveIation -

uItimateIy, that is the quest,

to find the uItimate answer to the uItimate human riddIe, which is:

How does this story end?

Does Revelation predict the end of the human story?

Or does the book reveal other secrets?

A coded political manifesto,

or the rantings of a mad man?

No matter how we interpret Revelation,

we cannot avoid the fact that it is part of all our lives.

lt influences elections, wars, the future.

PeopIe throughout time have found in ReveIation what they want to find,

and some peopIe find messages of hope

and some peopIe find the most nightmarish scenarios of what Iies ahead.

Perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of the Book of Revelation

is to explore who the author was -

a man on the run from one of the most ruthless tyrants of all time.

Tradition holds John wrote the Book of Revelation at the end of the first century AD.

Jesus was a living memory,

and Christianity was a Jewish sect trying to survive the horrors of the Roman Empire.

For preaching about Jesus,

the Romans had banished John to a small island off the coast of Turkey.

I, John, who aIso am your brother, and companion in tribuIation

was in the isIe that is caIIed Patmos,

because I procIaimed God's word and gave testimony to Jesus.

Exiled from his fellow Christians,

John believed their only hope for survival was the return of Jesus.

The Romans must have seemed omnipotent.

The emperors then were cruel and masochistic,

men of vast power and desires.

The most infamous, Nero.

He ruled an empire that stretched from Britain to Africa

and included the holy city of Jerusalem.

ln 64 AD, Rome burned.

Rumours spread that Nero himself started the fire.

To avoid the wrath of his people, he needed a scapegoat.

He chose an easy target -

the renegade Jews known as Christians.

His wrath was brutal and bizarre.

The earIy Christians were being very activeIy persecuted by the Romans.

Life was IikeIy to be nasty, brutish and short.

You had to keep on the run.

If they caught you, they'd banish you, they'd kiII you, they'd torture you.

One form of torture.. animals were set loose to devour human victims

for the amusement of Roman soldiers.

Death was considered a reIativeIy miId punishment for somebody.

The Romans forced their subjects to worship the emperor as if he were a deity.

A sacrilege for Jews and Christians.

ln 66 AD, the Jews fought back.

They gained control of the temple in Jerusalem.

lt was a short-lived victory.

The Romans sacked the temple, overran the city, and evicted the Jews.

They would not return for nearly 1,900 years.

The author of Revelation may also have fled Jerusalem in the aftermath of the revolt.

Under the cover of darkness,

he preached the gospel to covert gatherings of believers.

Christians of John's generation believed Jesus had promised to return quickly,

in their lifetimes,

to rescue them from the tyranny of Roman rule.

But Jesus had failed to appear.

Eventually, the Romans banished John.

John was an angry person,

hurt, frustrated, and vengefuI.

He's sIeeping with a rock for his piIIow on the earth

and he doesn't know how Iong they're going to Ieave him there.

And he has these dreams and visions and nightmares

and fantasies and haIIucinations

and he writes it.

The brutal images of Revelation come from a life of anguish.

Jungian psychologist Paul Watsky

claims the book itself can reveal clues to John's mental state.

Are the strange images of Revelation the result of insanity?

Anybody who's Iiving that kind of Iife is going to be under enormous psychoIogicaI stress.

We can specuIate about who John was and how he was constituted psychoIogicaIIy.

He couId have beIieved that what was going on in his own mind

was in fact going on in the cosmos in a major way.

What I doubt very much, though, is that he was psychotic in the most severe way,

for instance, schizophrenic,

because in schizophrenia, peopIe's thoughts are not that weII organised.

They wouIdn't produce a great work of Iiterature,

which I wouId consider ReveIation to be.

Watsky is not alone.

Many scholars believe John was not a mad man, but quite sane,

a strategic revolutionary.

The book may be a coded message to the beleaguered faithful

that Jesus will soon return and destroy their enemies, the Romans.

Writing against Rome at the time meant death.

So John may have disguised his message in a secret language

only Christians would have understood.

The clues are littered throughout the book.

The most famous.. the number of the beast - 666.

Let anyone with understanding caIcuIate the number of the beast,

for it is the number of a man.

Its number is 666.

John was asking the reader to solve a riddle.

Who is 666?

For nearly 2,000 years, people have tried.

Some answers have included popes,

kings,

dictators,

business leaders, presidents.

But all these people lived well after John's death.

Who did he mean?

ln John's time, numerology was used to encode words.

Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet was paired with a number.