Positions Revelation within an ancient Jewish context and demonstrates how the author used humor to resist Roman power.

This dissertation argues that Revelation is a Jewish postcolonial text that uses humor as a mode of opposition and repair in the face of imperial trauma. In order to demonstrate this, I argue that Revelation is, first and foremost, best read historically as a Jewish text. While Revelation scholarship typically situates the Apocalypse within a Christian conversation-contending, for instance, that it is a Christian text or, at best, a Jewish-Christian text-I illustrate how and why it is Jewish from beginning to end. Utilizing a postcolonial dialogical framework, I also argue that Revelation relies on a dialogical use of Jewish and Greco-Roman comic scripts to "write back" to Empire and make its anti-imperial claims. I suggest that the Apocalypse is postcolonial in the performative sense: It bears witness to the history of colonial oppression that subtends its cultural and psychological existence while bringing into being imaginatively a postcolonial form of community. This postcolonial reimagining, I further suggest, is evidenced not only in its claims of trauma and the value of a Jewish cultural self in the face of that trauma-integral parts of postcolonial-posttraumatic repair-but also in its erosion of the imperial transcript(s) that have deemed Jews "Other than." This erosion is performed through Revelation's use of humor. By "roasting" past/present Empires packaged into a Roman reality, Revelation creates a comic counterworld in which implied Jewish audiences overcome past/present Empires, particularly Rome. However, just as a "roastmaster" today often mirrors her/his subjects in mocking them, and just as a survivor of imperial trauma often risks introjection in her/his recovery process, so too does the vitriolic humor directed against Rome risk attaching itself to Revelation's viii messiah and God's empire, which goes against the grain of the text's ostensible intentions and has the effect of turning the joke back onto the Apocalypse.

Empire-critical and postcolonial readings of Revelation are now commonplace, but scholars have not yet put these views into conversation with Jewish trauma and cultural survival strategies. In this book, Sarah Emanuel positions Revelation within its ancient Jewish context. Proposing a new reading of Revelation, she demonstrates how the text's author, a first century CE Jewish Christ-follower, used humor as a means of resisting Roman power. Emanuel uses multiple critical lenses, including humor, trauma, and postcolonial theory, together with historical-critical methods. These approaches enable a deeper understanding of the Jewishness of the early Christ-centered movement, and how Jews in antiquity related to their cultural and religious identity. Emanuel's volume offers new insights and fills a gap in contemporary scholarship on Revelation and biblical scholarship more broadly.

Originally published in 1928, this book contains a revision of the English translation of the biblical book of Revelation, first done by John Oman in 1923. Oman makes some key changes to his earlier publication, especially with regards to the length and number sections into which he divided the book, as well as some alterations to the translation. The original Greek text is presented on each facing page of the English, and a brief analysis is provided at the end to supplement the longer analysis in the 1923 version. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in biblical commentary and the preservation and transmission of biblical texts.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

What’s so humorous about the Bible? Quite a bit, especially if experienced with others! Nine biblical scholars explore their experiences of reading and hearing passages from the Bible and discovering humor that becomes clearer in performance. Each writer found clues in their chosen biblical text that suggested biblical authors expected an audience to respond with laughter. Performers have a powerful role in either bringing out or tamping down humor in the Bible. One audience may be more disposed to respond to humor than another. And each contributor found that experiencing humor changed the interpretation of the biblical passage. From Genesis to Revelation, this study uncovers the Bible’s potential for humor.

While feminist interpretations of the Book of Revelation often focus on the book’s use of feminine archetypes—mother, bride, and prostitute, this commentary explores how gender, sexuality, and other feminist concerns permeate the book in its entirety. By calling audience members to become victors, Revelation’s author, John, commends to them an identity that flows between masculine and feminine and challenges ancient gender norms. This identity befits an audience who follow the Lamb, a genderqueer savior, wherever he goes. In this commentary, Lynn R. Huber situates Revelation and its earliest audiences in the overlapping worlds of ancient Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and first-century Judaism. She also examines how interpreters from different generations living within other worlds have found meaning in this image-rich and meaning-full book.