The historical reading
Christadelphians have read Revelation as continuous history: a sequence of events from John’s day to the return of Christ, written in signs. Its key is in Scripture itself. Christ “signified” the book (1:1), many symbols are explained in the text (1:20; 17:9-18), and the visions of Daniel supply the rest: beasts are kingdoms, horns are kings, a day stands for a year.
This walkthrough follows Robert Roberts’ Thirteen Lectures on the Apocalypse, given in Birmingham in 1880. Roberts called the lectures “a stepping stone to Eureka”, John Thomas’s full exposition. The explanations here are a summary in modern words, not quotations.
Since 1880
Roberts expected Christ to return soon, during the sixth vial. He has not yet come, and the sixth vial has run longer than Roberts expected. Its central sign has been fulfilled in a way he did not live to see: the Ottoman power was dried up completely, Jerusalem was freed from Turkish rule in 1917, and Israel was restored in 1948. Some of his details were mistaken, because they were tied to the Europe of his day: he still looked to Vienna as the seat of the beast, and he passed on John Thomas’s conviction that the city of Rome would be engulfed by volcanic fire. The outline of history stands, and the warning of the sixth vial stands with it: “Behold, I come as a thief.”
Sources
- Scripture: King James Version, quoted verbatim.
- Robert Roberts, Thirteen Lectures on the Apocalypse (1880; 4th edition 1921). Each step names the lecture it follows.
- John Thomas, Eureka: An Exposition of the Apocalypse (1861–1869).
- Historical dates are standard ones: for example the sack of Rome (410), the end of the western empire (476), the fall of Constantinople (1453), the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the capture of Pope Pius VII (1809), the end of the Papal States (1870) and of the Ottoman Empire (1922).
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