The early Christian tradition identified John as an exile who received a
series of revelations that challenged Roman imperial power structures. Yet
contemporary scholars have not considered how ancient exilic literature might
have resonated among Revelation’s early readers, those who expand upon John’s
allusive self-description by expressly classifying him as an exile. This paper
will address this question by analyzing how exilic discourses exploited the
concept of the imaginary—the capacity for an author ‘to see [a thing] other than
it is’—in order to create new social meaning. In the imperial age, Greco-Roman
writers on exile were especially proficient in seeing ‘otherwise’: they utilized
the exilic topos to reconfigure imperial constructions of identity,
knowledge, power, and space. In a similar fashion, the formulation of
counter-identities and counter-spaces are central features of the book of
Revelation. In this text, John rejects the empire’s narrative of displacement
and instead transforms himself into an authoritative visionary and his location
into a place of revelatory triumph. From this position, the seer speaks in the
register of the exultant exile, one who exposes the fragility of the imperial
apparatus, envisions a more durable social order based upon the word of God and
the testimony of Jesus Christ, and invites his audience to join with him in
celebrating the imminent appearance of the new heaven and earth.
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