SOURCE: Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. “Revelation.” In The New Testament and its Modern Interpreters, edited by Eldon Jay Epp and George W. MacRae, pp. 407-27. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Fiorenza presents an overview of Revelation scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s.

Ernst Lohmeyer summed up the scholarly efforts during the research period 1920 to 1934 with the observation that very few early Christian writings have been so greatly courted by scholars but have so thoroughly eluded their methods of interpretation. The elusive meaning of Revelation might be one of the reasons why serious critical scholarship has largely neglected the book in the research period 1945 to 1980. [See postscript below.] This is obvious if one compares research on Revelation, for example, with the number of publications, commentaries, monographs, and conferences on the Fourth Gospel, the Synoptics, or the Pauline literature. Except for some outstanding dissertations, serious research on Revelation...