Rhetoric Race and Religion
Revelations
Visions, Prophecy, and Politics
in the Book of Revelation
By Elaine Pagels
Viking. 246 pp. $27.95.
Review by Hal Taussig
Elaine Pagels is perhaps the preeminent voice of biblical scholarship to the American public. With the best yet of her finely tuned prose for the general reader, her new book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, takes a significant step closer to confirming her in that role.
Turning her attention to biblical writings in a more focused manner than in any previous book, Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, again rewards her readers with clear reports from scholarship and cogent analogies from contemporary American life.
On the surface, this book is about the Revelation to John, which she calls “the strangest book in the Bible.” Her first chapter masterfully turns the choppy scenes and wild imagery of the last book of the Bible into a seamless pair of stories. She weaves together the sequence of action in Revelation with an extremely cogent review of the last 30 years of biblical scholarship on this book.
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