[GCFL-discuss] Revelations 6 - the 4 Horsemen of the Apocaplypse

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

Here's an interesting article
http://www.equip.org/site/c.muI1LaMNJrE/b.2770387/k.BA6E/JAA666_Who_is_the_Antichrist.htm
~Lance
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 8:01 PM, Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List
<gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> wrote:

>  Martin Luther recommended that the Revelation to John, as it is actually
> titled, should be left out of the Bible, because it is neither reliable nor
> prophetic. The conference he was addressing had already taken six books out
> of the Old Testament, the books known as the Apocrypha which talk about
> diplomatic relations between the Hasmonean dynasty and the Roman Senate,
> among other trivia. That's why the RC has 72 books in their Bible, and
> Protestants have 66. If we only had 65, we wouldn't be one digit short of
> our Bible forming the number 666. Coptics have 83, including the outlandish
> stuff about bullies trying to hit Jesus when he was a little boy, and
> dropping dead on the street, the stuff Anne Rice used for her b-grade
> I've-just-been-converted-I'm-not-into-vampires-anymore novel.
>
> A final note on the Apocrypha: since they deal with pre-Jesus stuff, I
> asked a rabbi once how they are viewed in Jewish scholarship. He replied
> "The Apocrypha are... apocryphal," which basically means he puts no more
> reliance on them than Luther, Calvin or Zwingli did.
>
> But The Revelation was left in for some reason. I'm skeptical of it myself,
> because Chapter 2 and 3 read like factional polemics within the early
> church; John was mad at the Nicolaitanes, whatever they were, and disputed
> points about Balaam and Balac with this church or that church. Who knows if
> G-d had anything to do with any of it? It could have been the 1st century
> equivalent of the Nun Bun (the cinammon roll in Nashville that had a passing
> resemblance to Mother Teresa's face).
>
> But moving on the Chapter 6, it has such a remarkable resemblance to the
> vision of Black Elk, preserved in John G. Neihardt's classic, *Black Elk
> Speaks*, that I think John must have been on a missionary trip to the
> Black Hills some ten or twenty years before he had the vision on Patmos.
>
> What does each horse represent? The first represents barbarian conquest.
> The second represents feudal tyranny. The third represents the capitalist
> market economy. The fourth represents the unsuccessful communist attempt to
> replace the capitalist market economy with peace and plenty for all,
> resulting in even more destruction. Unfortunately, there is not a fifth
> horse which would tell us what is coming next. But the prophecy certainly
> implies that when Obama is elected, he will put all the pieces back together
> after the destruction wreaked by the four horses, and then Jesus will come
> check things out and say "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
>
> OK, now I have convinced John that indeed the Revelation is not prophetic
> and should be removed from the Bible as Luther advocated. The clincher is
> that line about the souls under the altar asking how long they have to wait.
> As C.S. Lewis pointed out, time is no limitation on God, so upon quitting
> their earthly bodies, the souls would be timeless, not waiting for further
> events on earth. To God, its all one timeless NOW.
>
> Siarlys
>
> P.S. I am not really anti-Catholic, I just decline to recognize Papal
> authority. I have a second cousin from Tennessee who married an RC, and he
> got a job as basketball coach at Ole Miss, where I believe he still works.
> The first day, another coach told him "We'll be pleased to see you at the
> First Baptist Church this Sunday." When he replied "I'm Catholic," the other
> coach got a look on his face like "if we knew that, you wouldn't ever have
> been hired."
>
>
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