Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
Sometimes overlooked in our zeal, two millennia [after Jesus died], is the insistence of early teachings that Jesus would return pronto. John begins the book of Revelation by affirming that the time nears. As David Chilton puts it, “Not once did he imply that his book was written with the twentieth century in mind, and that Christians would be wasting their time attempting to decipher it until the Scofield Reference Bible would become a best-selling novel.” Commentators on Revelation often mention that, unlike other apocalyptic material, John makes no attempt to set a date for his future events, but in truth, John repeatedly promises they will happen now. If you reread the New Testament scriptures, trying to put yourself in the first century, you’ll easily see why Christians believed Jesus would reappear within their lifetimes. The calamitous events of the times surely added weight to this belief, particularly when the Temple fell. Read carefully the prophecy of Daniel:
Daniel 9:25, NLT: Now listen and understand! Seven sets of seven plus sixty-two sets of seven will pass from the time the command is given to rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One comes. Jerusalem will be rebuilt with streets and strong defenses, despite the perilous times. After this period of sixty-two sets of seven, the Anointed One will be killed, appearing to have accomplished nothing, and a ruler will arise whose armies will destroy the city and the Temple. The end will come with a flood, and war and its miseries are decreed from that time to the very end.
Sixty-nine “sets of seven” multiply to 483 years. The Jews did not know exactly when to begin counting this 483 years or perhaps exactly how long it had been since they returned from Babylon to begin the rebuilding process, but they understood it must have already been about the number of years prophesied here, so the end times neared. Indeed, if we do the math, beginning with the decree issued by Artaxerxes for Nehemiah to begin rebuilding in 457 BCE, the first “seven sets of seven” bring us to 408 BCE, by which time the rebuilding of Jerusalem was finished. Then, the next sixty-two sets of seven bring us to the year 26 CE, right about to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as he turned thirty years old. The repeated appearances of would-be Messiahs about this time kept the Jews stirred up into a constant religious fervor. Christians possessed no copyright on the title of Christ.
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, pp. 21, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
A mysterious figure threads his way through the Gospel of John, from its beginning (see John 1:35, the unidentified partner of Andrew) to its end. This person, one of the few who had “been with [Jesus] from the beginning” (the requirement listed in verse 15:27 for a legitimate witness) appears to be finally obeying Jesus’ request to “testify,” by writing this Gospel.
John’s Gospel usually calls this person “the disciple whom Jesus loves,” though sometimes he appears as merely a silent witness. This shadowy figure invites speculation among scholars, who argue for anyone from an idealized image of the perfect Christian (rather than a historic person) to a female lover and follower of Jesus. I’m unable to entertain these speculations and instead find myself succumbing to the earliest tradition, that this figure represents John the Apostle. John, though a very important figure in the story of Jesus, appears nowhere in this Gospel … unless he is the mysterious Beloved Disciple.
Current scholarship has grown skeptical. Perhaps the most noted Johannine scholar of the twentieth century, Raymond E. Brown, once accepted the traditional identification of the Beloved Disciple as the apostle John but later changed his mind.
One thing stands out about this unidentified person: whereas many events are reported in other Gospels for which no eyewitness is presented, if we consider this shadowy figure in John to be one of the Twelve, at first a disciple of John the Baptist, then it turns out that this man was a probable eyewitness to every word and event reported in John’s Gospel, with but three notable exceptions—the conversation with the Samaritan woman, the examination before Pilate, and Jesus’ Resurrection. The first exception is probably meant to be understood as a parable, not a literal event, the second could have been relayed by Nicodemus, and the third told by Mary Magdalene.
The attestation that the mysterious figure is “the one Jesus loved,” coupled with the fact that he is privy to everything going on in Jesus’ life, suggests further that he is one of the inner three: James, John, or Peter. Since Peter is accounted for often by name in this Gospel, that leaves us with only two other options, and I think it’s reasonable in my story to trust tradition and assume this figure is intended to be John the Apostle.
This has been an admittedly short discussion, given the reams of paper that have been sacrificed to this topic, but these are the foundational points in the argument for identifying the Beloved Disciple as the apostle John.
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
“You misunderstand something, Matthew,” John insisted. “Jesus came not to banish sin by force. ‘He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’”
“A little sheep?” Matthew sneered. “Then what happened to the mighty lamb of your vision? A proud horned ram, sitting with God on the throne, commanding worship? Able to remove the seven seals and open the scroll of war?”
“Yes, that’s what I wrote, but now I want to show you a different kind of lamb.”
“‘Worthy is the Lamb to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!’” Matthew sang.
“Listen!” John commanded sharply. “I have received a different vision these last fifteen years.”
Matthew ignored him. “When the real Messiah comes, he will stand on Mount Zion with 144,000 other great warriors! He will storm down into the plains of Armageddon and slay an army of 200 million! He will oversee the torment of evil sinners in burning sulfur! The smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever! That will be the reward of the sinful!”
“Jesus did come to overthrow sin, but not by destroying the sinful! He came to atone for our sin!”
“‘Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of the Lamb!’” Matthew bawled, still quoting from John’s letter, unperturbed by the gawking families on the other side of the courtyard. Ruth cringed, shaking her head as the tension once again threatened to boil over.
Matthew stabbed his finger again. “That’s what the kings of the earth will cry to the rocks and the mountains!” Then he turned to Ruth and spoke in his expository tone. “Enoch wrote about a great horned bull that morphs into a lamb with black horns. That’s what the Baptizer talked about, a heroic victory by the lamb, purging the world of sin. I’ve memorized these Scriptures, Ruth. Enoch wrote: ‘Purify the earth from all oppression, from all injustice, from all crime, from all impiety, and from all the pollution which is committed upon it. Exterminate them from the earth. Then shall all the children of men be righteous, and all nations shall pay me divine honors, and bless me; and all shall adore me. The earth shall be cleansed from all corruption, from every crime, from all punishment, and from all suffering.’”
John tried again, his own voice beginning to rise. “That may be what the Baptizer imagined, Matthew, but—”
“And the Testament of Joseph tells how the lamb overcomes evil beasts and crushes them underfoot. So that’s the kind of lamb John saw in his vision fifteen years ago, and—”
“Oy, a broch! I was wrong, you tiresome gnat!” John finally shouted back, rising up on one elbow and betraying a fire that should no longer live in one so old and skinny. Then he winced and turned his face in shame, blowing a sigh through pursed lips. “I mean, everything I wrote of my vision came true, but not in the way we expected. Please, Matthew. Listen to me.”
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders.In a loud voice they sang:
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!”
This echoes Daniel 7:10: Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court was seated, and the books were opened. But don’t look for wings and halos among this multitude. Revelation, like Daniel, often portrays believers as angels, and in this verse these “angels” are merely people.
Angels in Revelation can represent many things. When John writes to the elders of the churches in chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation, he calls them angels, but he refers to people. John, at least twice, presents Jesus as an angel (verses 10:1 and 14:14). In verse 21:12, twelve “angels” stand guard over the gates of the New Jerusalem; in Isaiah 62:6, these watchmen on the walls are prophets, not angels. Interestingly, Revelation is also the earliest Jewish or Christian literature in which angels fly.
With this flexible definition of Revelation’s “angels” in mind, we see now that the throne-room scene in chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation has been leading us to this moment at the end of time, when all of creation joins in praise, like scanning the last page of the book first. In the next verse, even the creatures on earth join in the praise. Remember this moment, because we will return to it time and again throughout the book of Revelation.
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
In the beginning was the Logos, John tells us. Logos, the Greek word translated as Word in the NASB, is the mind of God controlling this world, the force changing it from chaos to order, and for hundreds of years before Christ, it portrayed a philosophical line of thought known well by all learned men in the Hellenistic world, much as scholars today might discuss evolution or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Plato once said to his followers, “It may be that someday there will come forth from God a Logos, who will reveal all mysteries and make everything plain.” The idea of the Logos, or Word, began back in the sixth century BCE among the Greeks, in the very city in which John’s Gospel was supposedly written (Ephesus). Its roots go deep into Stoicism, where it is perceived as a sort of cosmic reason, giving order and structure to the universe. In Stoic thought, Logos was reason, the impersonal, rational principle governing the universe. This principle was thought to pervade the entire universe and was indeed the only god recognized by the Stoics.
Philo of Alexandria provides our best Jewish example of this line of thought. “Logos” is the term Philo used to reconcile Stoicism and Judaism. He speaks of the knowledge of God as eternal life, and identifies the Logos as the firstborn Son of God—a phrase which, until New Testament times, had always been understood metaphorically. The Logos for Philo was never personal either.
In an astounding claim, John now alleges this Logos has arrived … in the flesh! Literally, as written in Greek, John’s hymn says God “tabernacled” with mortals, choosing a temporary dwelling place among his people. It evokes an image of the portable tabernacle of the Hebrew nation as they travelled through the wilderness.
Until these verses, John’s intended Hellenistic audience would have never imagined that he was speaking about a historical character, or describing the events of a historical life. But now John drops a bombshell: he is writing about the glory of the Jewish Messiah, a flesh-and-blood person! A profound claim is made here, and the wording is not coincidental. Ezekiel 37:27 reads, “My dwelling place will be with them: I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Devout Jews looked forward to a future age, an era of righteous reign, when God himself would come back to earth, set up his messianic kingdom, and “tabernacle” among his people. The Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, which is an integral part of John’s theology in this Gospel, anticipates this great day. And now, it has finally arrived! John is telling us in song about the very day God came down to earth.
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
“Jesus sits on the throne?” Matthew queried. “I thought God sat on the throne.”
Samuel grimaced. “I don’t know. John’s vision sometimes confuses me,” he admitted before quickly continuing. “Around the throne, the elders and living creatures each hold a lyre and a bowl of incense.”
Matthew laughed. “How can anybody play the lyre while holding a bowl? Do they have three arms?”
Samuel frowned again. “I don’t think that’s the point, Matthew. It’s not only Jews who use a harp in temple worship to accompany hymns. Have you seen the artwork in our neighbors’ homes of Apollo holding a lyre and a bowl in a libation scene?”
“Libation? What does that mean?”
“It’s a ritual pouring of a drink as an offering to a god, like we do in the synagogue.”
Matthew squinted. “John’s vision should remind us of Apollo? You mean even the god Apollo will worship Jesus?”
“Even Apollo,” Samuel affirmed, not yet ready to reveal who on earth played the lyre and thought of himself as the Greek god Apollo, and before whom the kings of the earth bowed and laid down their crowns in obeisance.
Matthew lowered his chin into his hands, thinking aloud. “Twenty-four elders pretending to be kings lay down their crowns before God’s throne. Then along comes Jesus to sit with God on the throne. Now, the elders pretend to be Apollo, hinting that even the gods will worship Jesus.” Quietly, still averting his eyes, he said, “Father, the Sanhedrin judged Jesus correctly. This is blasphemy.”
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, pp. 21, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
“Our Christ is dead.” Matthew spat the words as four separate invectives.
“No, Matthew, our Christ lives,” said John. “How did Paul put it? ‘Christ has existed from the beginning, from before the creation of the world.’”
“Paul said no such thing! My father read to me all the letters of Paul! We know Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary.”
Ruth spoke next, hoping to thwart the tension that seemed to be bubbling up between these two turbulent men. “Another letter from Paul has recently surfaced, Matthew. This time, written to the city of Colossae.”
“And you really think Paul wrote it?” Matthew scoffed. “Paul died thirty years ago.”
“It bears not only his name, but his spirit. ‘He is the visible likeness of the invisible God’, this letter claims.”
“Who is? Paul?”
“No,” Ruth smiled. “Our Lord Jesus. ‘For through Christ, God created everything in heaven and on earth. God created the whole universe through him and for him. Christ existed before all things.’”
Matthew stood dumbfounded. This didn’t sound like Paul at all.
“‘For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.’”
“Ruth,” John interrupted. “Sing the hymn for Matthew.”
“Sing?” Ruth winced. Mud-plastered stone fenced the courtyard but didn’t do much for privacy, the wall being only about four feet tall. Neighboring homes, their dwellers audibly and visibly present, stood but a few feet beyond the wall in every direction. From an upper window to the south, Ruth could hear a family praying loudly to Zeus. To the west, a man stood to salute someone in the name of Domitian Caesar. A Roman visitor must have wandered by, outside Ruth’s line of vision. “Now? Must I?”
“Please. The hymn I taught you.”
Ruth ducked her head and cautiously began:
JOHN CHAPTER 1
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, pp. 15-16, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
“Do you understand that Jesus is the Christ?” Samuel pressed on. “The Messiah must be born into the royal lineage of our greatest warrior, King David, and he must redeem our people with the sword, but most Jews refuse to consider Jesus the one. Because although the blood of King David surges through the veins of our Lord Jesus, he came first as a lamb, silent before his accusers.”
“Who were his accusers?”
“The Romans and the Jewish council of elders, the Sanhedrin. They sentenced him to die on a cross because he threatened to destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days.”
“I would not have been a lamb, Father! I would have been a true Messiah! I would have fought with my sword and spilled the blood of all my enemies. This Jesus cannot really be the Messiah,” Matthew spat.
“Listen, my son. He’s both a lion and a lamb. Like a lamb to the slaughter, Jesus shed his own blood for us through meekness and humility, in atonement for our sin.”
Matthew resisted the impulse to stick out his tongue in disgust. Fortunately, he knew better than to disrespect his father.
“But now he returns to finish his work,” Samuel continued, unperturbed. “He will take vengeance on all his enemies. My son, we will soon behold the true Messiah in all his glory! Jesus, from his throne in heaven, will show himself to be alive again! This time, for ever and ever!”
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, pp. 19-20, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
Have you read Revelation: The Way It Happened? If so, maybe it’s time to pick up the second book and finish the story of Matthew’s spiritual journey. Here he is in book two, now an adult, speaking with the aged apostle John:
—
“Christians are no longer welcome in the synagogues. I went to a service with my father a few days before he died. He wished to experience one last Sabbath, sharing the rituals of our God in the synagogue, so we endured the stares and joined the congregation. The president noted our arrival and asked me to lead us in the Amidah, the common prayer.”
“And you did?”
“I did. I began reading the Amidah as requested, and soon arrived at the Twelfth Benediction—
“For the apostates let there be no hope.
And let the arrogant government
Be speedily uprooted in our days.
“—exactly as before. But then, John, then came words I had never read before. Words that recently had been added to the prayer—
“Let the Christians and the heretics be destroyed in a moment.
“I read this curse aloud before realizing what I had said. I clamped my mouth shut and scanned the words on the scroll as the prayer continued:
“And let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the righteous.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the proud!
“I remained silent, refusing to speak this hideous passage in the presence of my father, and stared at the congregation and then at the president, who had chosen me to recite the words that would curse me and my father and the few other Christians who still attended. When I set the prayer scroll down, the president wordlessly stepped forward and grasped my elbow, escorting me from the synagogue. Moments later, my father appeared at the door as well.”
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, p. 3, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. –Relevation 4:1-2
Early Christians envisioned this passage in Revelation very differently than we do today. Let me paint you a picture of common first-century cosmological beliefs, which will help explain how a door “opened in heaven” and a trumpeting voice said “come up here.” John writes in Greek, in which the word for heaven is the same as for sky.
Picture a flat earth, unmoving, poking up out of the waters. A bowl, or dome, covers and protects the entire earth, which separates the waters below from the waters above. Doors in the heavens (the top of the dome) allow water from above to come through as rain. If you think of a snow globe—one of those Christmas scenes you shake upside down and then turn right-side up to watch the snow fall—you’ll have the general idea.
The sun and the moon—the two great lights—track across the underside of this dome every day and night to provide light. At night, most people imagined the stars to be either gods or angels, while some still pictured them as little holes in the dome for the gods to peek through. The earth rests on pillars reaching down through the waters to hell (Sheol). The only path to hell passes through the grave, where the spirits of the dead all go, down, down, to a shadowy, joyless, ghostly form of life, awaiting their resurrection.
This basic understanding, shared among many ancient Mediterranean civilizations, fits well with the description we read in Genesis 1. Heaven is up, and hell is down, with the earth caught in the middle. When writers of the King James version translated “bowl” or “dome” into “firmament”—the closest word we could find in English to describe what we then believed about the world around us—this shrouded the original picture. Although alternative theories about the universe had been proffered by the time of John the Apostle, including a multilayered heaven, the Genesis description still held popular appeal.
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, pp. 12-13, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
“He didn’t come.”
The old man blinked and said nothing.
“He’s not coming back for us, is he? The Temple will never be rebuilt.”
“Matthew, you must write again. You must write a new gospel. I will give you the words.”
“I cannot.” Matthew nervously stroked his beard, then caught himself and dropped his hand to avoid calling attention to the sorry little patch of oversized whiskers on his chin. Twenty-eight years old and still he couldn’t outgrow his baby face into a proper Jew.
He shifted his weight, folding his arms inside his cloak, and stared resolutely down at the man, a fellow Jew quietly dying. Goatskin stretched between two parallel poles that rested upon a stack of bricks at one end and a log at the other formed a makeshift cot for the weathered old man. Matthew recognized the brick pile from fifteen years ago, now overgrown with moss, for this was the very dirt courtyard in which he had carved wooden swords and triumphed over dragons and Romans. In those days, good was good and evil was evil. The best days of his life. The mud-brick home of his childhood stood but a few feet away. Little had changed, but nothing felt the same.
The wind shuffled leaves around Matthew’s boots as he waited for a reply. “I cannot write it,” he repeated. “If Jesus came not as Messiah, then his life was a lie. God no longer takes our side.”
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, prologue, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
“Our Lord holds the seven stars?” Matthew looked up questioningly.
“I will explain in due time, my son. Now, sit with me.”
“Yes, Father,” Matthew acquiesced, rightly perceiving this as not the time for attitude. He sat down, leaning against the rock wall, quite happy to delay his studies even if the interruption didn’t give him opportunity to play; even if he received no silver for his attention.
“You remember my telling you about Jesus of Nazareth, don’t you? The Son of God, they called him?”
“Of course I remember!” Matthew couldn’t help rolling his eyes as he recalled all the days he’d spent with his father’s Christian friends. “Some called him the Messiah, but others say he died a criminal’s death at the hand of the Romans.”
“Yes, the Romans crucified him on a cross. My heart has been heavy, Matthew, ever since we escaped the Holy City and fled here to the church of Ephesus. The fathers here have been kind to us these twelve years, but still I wonder. How could things have gone so wrong? If Jesus is the risen Messiah, why didn’t he fight for us during the war? How could he let our holy Temple be destroyed? How could God allow such destruction in Zion, and then how could his Son delay his return for so long afterward? Have we been forgotten? Or was Jesus not the Messiah after all? These thoughts have often troubled me.”
Unsure of how to address his father’s doubts, Matthew coughed into a fist, buying time. Fathers should have answers, not questions. This already felt like an uncomfortable initiation into the adult world. “Jesus told us the Temple would be destroyed,” he remembered. “Not one stone left upon another. What he said came true!”
Samuel smiled and placed an affectionate hand on the shoulder of his only surviving child. “You’ve been paying attention at the communion meals, haven’t you? I knew you were ready for this discussion. Matthew, do you remember John, the son of Zebedee?”
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, p. 9, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened
Inside these pages lives a love story set aright.
About fifteen years after Revelation, a second very different work attributed to John the Apostle surfaced.[1] It is the year 95 CE, and Matthew, son of Samuel, has lived nearly three decades. This book continues my first story, Revelation: The Way It Happened, but this time our task will be much more complex, as we lack the historical clues required to settle on a determinative interpretation of the Gospel of John. We shall be forced to dig deeper this time around, if we are to unearth John’s meaning.
The mind-set of early Christians remains foreign to most believers today, two thousand years after the time of Christ. If we are to fathom Christianity’s dilemma in the first century, we must appreciate their absolute and utter conviction that the anticipated Messiah had arrived. What separated Christianity from other Judaic sects was simply this: Christians claimed the messianic age had begun. Or at least as the apostle Paul put it, the new age lived in its birth pangs. They simply had no other way to interpret the Messiah’s arrival. For Christians, the end-times had arrived.
Paul argued that Christ rising from the dead was proof that the general resurrection had begun, but when nothing more materialized of this expectation, what were Christians to think? Why did people continue to die? Why did anyone still hunger? Why were the Romans still in charge, and where hid the age of God’s rule? Christianity’s greatest disappointment was not the Crucifixion of its Messiah. It was not the martyring of its most vocal leaders, Peter and Paul. It was not even the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. It was that the disasters ceased, the excitement of the first century drained, and life continued as usual.
Enter John’s Gospel.
–John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened, 2013, p. xv, by Lee Harmon
Book Excerpt: Revelation: The Way It Happened
Inside these pages lives a love story gone awry.
You’re about to read the Revelation story the way it would have been understood by its audience in the early years after Christ. “Revelation” means “apocalypse,” an unveiling of earthly events from the perspective of the gods in heaven. It’s one of only two apocalyptic books in our Christian Bible, along with Daniel. If you have grown up interpreting Revelation from a futuristic viewpoint—by assuming that most, if not all, of the vision will yet unreel when Christ returns to redeem His own—then my book’s viewpoint may seem foreign to you. The world looked very different to Christians in the first century.
The book of Revelation sports a storied history, hated by some church fathers but grudgingly accepted by others because of its presumed authorship by one of the original twelve apostles: John, the son of Zebedee. As late as the fourth century in the West and the seventh century in the East, Bible-builders still bickered over the question of whether Revelation ought to be included in Christian scripture. Popularity did not matter when building the “canon,” our chosen scriptures. Church fathers rejected the Shepherd of Hermas, greatly loved in the second century, because its author confessed he was not an original disciple of Jesus. They eventually accepted Revelation, with its bizarre images and tone of revenge so contrary to the Gospels, because of two words in the book: I, John.
Thus, Bible compilers preserved our map of the end times. For every generation since the death of Christ on the cross, Christian thinkers have pointed to the signs and predicted Christ’s imminent return. Religions have been founded on this prediction. Surely no generation in history has been more able to lay claim to the approaching end times than our current generation … right? We look at the restoration of the Jewish city-state, the threat of a nuclear Armageddon, the spreading of the gospel to nearly every nation in the world, and of course, these evil, immoral times (for surely no generation before this could act so ungodly) to justify this belief. Yes, it seems clear that we flirt with the final days!
But this is not the case. The first generation before and after the holy war of 66 through 70 CE, with Jerusalem ransacked and the Temple destroyed, fits the apocalyptic message of Revelation far better than any other time in history.
–Revelation: The Way It Happened, 2010, pp 7-8, by Lee Harmon
Fantasy Football, Anyone?
Put on the whole uniform of the Team, that ye may be able to stand against the blitz of oncoming linebackers. Don the hip pads of truth, the shoulder pads of righteousness, the cleats of preparation. Don’t forget the facemask of faith and the helmet of salvation. Then clutch the pigskin with much Spirit, for that is what the Play Book of your Coach in Heaven demands.The River of Life
Twice before Lee Harmon has written about Christian topics, once on the gospel of John and once on the book of Revelation. But the question people keep asking him is this: As a liberal Christian, why do you care so much about the Bible? Others wonder whether he is truly a Christian at all.
The Way It Happened
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| Revelation: A love story gone awry. | The Gospel: A love story set aright. |
What really happened 2,000 years ago? How did a persecuted minority of end-time believers known as Christians, with their dreams of Armageddon and a conquering Messiah named Jesus, evolve into the largest religion in the world? Author Lee Harmon explores the period in which the New Testament was written in his books about John's Gospel and Revelation.
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The God Show
Lee Harmon interviewed on The God Show about the History Channel's miniseries The Bible and Lee's latest book, John's Gospel: The Way It Happened.
About Lee
Hello! I'm an author, historical Jesus scholar, book reviewer, and liberal Christian, which means I appreciate and attempt to exercise the humanitarian teachings of Jesus without getting hung up on any particular supernatural or religious beliefs.
The Bible is a magnificent book that has inspired and spiritually fed generations for thousands of years, and each new century seems to bring a deeper understanding of life’s purpose. This is true of not only Christianity; through the years, our age-old religions are slowly transforming from superstitious rituals into humanitarian philosophies. In short, we are growing up, and I am thrilled to be riding the wave.
I avidly read all thought-provoking religion titles. New authors: I'd love to read and review your book!
Contact me here.
About Leslie
Hi! While Lee writes the articles and reviews the books, I edit, organize, and maintain the blog. The views expressed here are Lee's but I'm his biggest supporter! :-)
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