Review of David L. Barr (ed.),The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation

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Abstract

This book contains selected essays given at the ‘Seminar on the Apocalypse: The Intersection of Literary and Social Methods’ at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The essays each explore what David Barr terms ‘the reality of the Apocalypse’. He insists that ‘far from being a fantasy of what will never be, the Apocalypse represents a reality that already existed, creating a social world that provided both community and individual identity to its audience’ (1). As well as literary criticism the contributions employ methods from the political and social sciences and discourse analysis. The first three essays apply genre criticism to the Apocalypse and ‘incorporate and seek to extend’ the work of the SBL Genres project. Gregory L. Linton’s essay argues for the importance of genre to literary analysis of Revelation, which he explains, establish the ‘horizons of expectation’ of readers, and are ‘models of writing’ for authors (15). Exploring the intertextuality of Apocalypse, Linton finds that texts rarely conform to genres; they are often hybrid, serving the author’s purposes and opening ‘multiple opportunities’ to the readers’ ‘selective attention’ (24). The liminal Apocalypse text confounds scholars’ attempts to BOOK REVIEWS

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