Apocalypse How?: Reading Revelation with Understanding

Publisher Marketing: The purpose of this manuscript is to help people who want to read Revelation so that they hear what it means to say on its own terms. Moving right into the text of Revelation and remaining there offers two main benefits. First, you will be spending time with the biblical text that interests you almost immediately. Second, you will be spending a lot of time in that text-living in it, if you please. The body of this work comes in four columns, thus the term "polyglot." The first column contains the Greek version of Revelation. The second column is titled "As Seen" and is a painfully literal translation which I have provided in order to let a reader get some sense of the Greek text as it is, including word order.3 Such a translation is slow and difficult to read, but slowing down the reading helps promote thought about the meaning of the words and the meaning produced by such combinations of words. The third column, titled "As Understood" is a translation I have provided (and continue to work on), which intends to replicate what the original reader would have understood. The fourth column provides notes and references that explain and support the change of language from columns one and two to column three. This column contains not only explanations but also biblical references that verify the translations offered in column three. This column will continue to fill in as time and conversation with readers produce more references and clarity of meaning. This book will surely produce many questions, perhaps more questions than answers, but these questions are generated by communion with the text, rather than impositions upon it. These questions will be pursued by individuals of humble determination to find the blessing God intends (Rev. 1:3). These questions will be considered by those who seek the meaning of details and identifications that can be pursued with a sense of reasonable certainty that we are getting the main point(s) of what John has to say while looking into the details.