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Hello, George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as the curious record of the visions of a drug addict. And if the Orthodox Christian church had its way, he would never have made it into the New Testament.

But the book of Revelation was included, and its images of apocalypse from the four horsemen to the horror Babylon were fixed into the Christian imagination and its theology.

As well as providing abundant imagery for artists from Dura to Blake, ideas of the end of the world have influenced the response to political, social and natural upheavals throughout history.

Our understanding of history itself owes much to the apocalyptic way of thinking.

But how did this powerful narrative of judgement and retribution evolve? And how does it still shape our thinking on the deepest questions of morality and history?

With me to discuss the apocalypse are just in champion, reader in the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway College University of London, Marina Benjamin, journalist and author of Living at the End of the World, and Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture.

Martin Palmer, first of all, what would you say the apocalypse was?

The apocalypse is essentially a vision of the meaning of history. And as such, it encapsulates about a thousand years of thought from around about the eighth century BC through to the first century AD of thinking that history now had a significance in a purpose.

Prior to that you have a notion of history as cyclical or just epochs that roll on. But with the coming of the prophets within Judaism and the idea that there is actually a significance to world events, and this particularly happens with the exile of the Jews to Babylon in the sixth century BC.

You begin to have the notion that history is being driven by a force. You also have the idea that there was a good time, a golden time, a garden of Eden or whatever.

Now we're in a bad time and eventually we'll get so bad that a new world will break through. So you have a linear concept of time which is hugely powerful still to this day.

Why do you think that came about when you came about and where you came about? Was it a Western European thing or did this start to happen all over the world at about the same time?

No, it is predominantly arising out of the Jewish theology which came from persecution. In particular it begins to take shape when the Jews in the second century BC were being hammered literally by the Greeks.

And everything they stood for was being attacked. In particular they were trying to observe the Sabbath and the Greeks quickly worked out that if you were trying to wipe out a Jewish garrison or town you attacked on the Sabbath because if they were good Jews they wouldn't attack back.

And so the whole question arose as to why on earth were those who were fulfilling the law actually paying the ultimate price for it of death.

And so you begin to get essentially a really rather nasty strand arising within religion which is vengeance and the notion that God is actually going to come and smash the evil doers, grind them into the ground.

But it wasn't only happening in Judaism there were similar trends arising within Chinese thought at the time.

There were millionaire movements around the time of Christ and into the first and second centuries AD in China. But they were very swiftly crushed.

What is so fascinating about this fringe philosophy of vengeance and end of time is that through the book of Revelation which many feel should never have got into the Bible.

Lawrence says it's the least Christian book in the Bible and then goes on to say but it's had more effect than all four gospels.

Because that book got into the Bible and was given authority it has run as a strand quite often an underground strand throughout Western history since in a way that it has never done for instance in Chinese thought.

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