Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

Let's talk right in and start looking at how the book of Revelation was and is interpreted.

The book crams in just about every figurative and allegorical method you can use in literature.

And also we're going to dive into Revelation's very deep roots in all the apocalyptic and Old Testament literature.

So we can really only hope to scratch the surface here, but it's a good start.

It is a good start.

And if you can make more sense of revelation than we can, probably won't be too hard.

Please, email.

Generally, there's three schools of the way that the book is interpreted.

There's the preterist, the historical, and the futurist.

The preterist is saying that all of this was basically history it all happened in the past

The historical is saying that it's some of it's happened in the past and some of its eminent

What eminent means is up for interpretation and then the futurist is saying that it's all, none of it's happened yet.

It's all going to happen in the future.

And the futurist is where you would get things like the left behind book series.

Raptor, even though the rapture doesn't come directly from the book of Revelation, it's that

that whole idea comes from interpreting Revelation as a handbook of what's going to happen.

Yes, and of course it depends when you're writing.

I think Revelation during the Napoleonic Wars was interpreted as predicting Napoleon and the end of the world.

And, of course, today, a lot of people still read it like that, saying the world's go end real soon, real soon.

Sacramento Christians, like Christians like the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, like the Cops and the Catholics and the Anglicans, they interpreted almost completely in the historical and the preterist camps with a little bit of futurists dabbled in there, where when you start getting into the Protestants, they're teaching it more, and not all of

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