A Main Theme of the Book of Revelation

Essentially Revelation is about the divorce of one ‘woman’ (one formerly just ‘woman’ who had gone bad), and the marrying of a new, faithful one. The scroll of Revelation 5:1 is actually a bill of divorce; the divorce being completed in the most emphatic manner with the annihilation of the harlot city, “Babylon”. I am indebted to Kenneth Gentry (Jr.) in “A Preterist View of Revelation” for spelling this out. E.g. [51-2]:

"When viewed against the backdrop of the theme of Jewish judgment, personages (a harlot and a bride), and the flow of Revelation (from the sealed scroll to a capital punishment for “adultery” to a “marriage feast” to the taking of a new “bride” as the “new Jerusalem”), the covenantal nature of the transaction suggests that the seven-sealed scroll is God’s divorce decree against his Old Testament wife for her spiritual adultery.In the Old Testament God “marries” Israel (see esp. Ezek. 16:8, 31-32), and in several places he threatens her with a “bill of divorce” (Isa. 50:1; Jer. 3:8)". (In C. Marvin Pate’s Four Views on the Book of Revelation, Zondervan, 1998.

The word “preterist” is based on a Latin word præteritus, meaning “gone by”, i.e. past). Also we want to clear up the serious problem (one of commentators own making) whereby the Apostles, expecting (according to such commentators) Christ’s final coming (Parousia), in their own day, were thus mistaken because that did not come about - still has not. Such an interpetation would suggest that Our Lord had passed on to His intimate friends the wrong time-table. This is, of course, quite unacceptable. My argument here will be that the Apostles were referring first and foremost to Christ’s victorious coming in 70 AD, thus freeing the early Church from her Judaïc (now corrupted and nationalistic) connections.

The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD may not mean a lot to us now in the C20th -especially we who have grown up with Western-based education that tends to eschew (or not understand) everything Semitic - but it meant a heck of a lot to those of the Apostolic era, who were mostly Jews, and who continued to worship in the Jerusalem Temple and the synagogues virtually to the very end.