This study proposes a new macrostructure for Revelation that is set within the context of published structural models.  It is one that is available to everyone (scholar or otherwise) as a guide for the book and for individual evaluations or interpretations, because the new macrostructure is reasonably straight-forward.  

The model is illustrated on the Macrostructure Model page (Figures 1-5) and everything else on the website is background information. 

Revelation is a letter that contains a prologue and an introduction (1:1-3:22), and it closes with confirmation of the vision’s credentials as a revelation from Jesus Christ and an epilogue (22:6-21).  Within the letter, is a single story from Creation to the New Order, told as two linked dramas (4:1-11:19 and 12:1-22:20a), which includes a surface, literary spiral (16:12-21:9) (Macrostructure Model, Figures 4-5).

This study suggests that the setting of the vision (the cosmos, i.e. the universe) within Revelation controls the structure of the text.  The cosmic spaces in the new macrostructure are the heavenly throne room, heaven’s environs, two earthly spaces (physical-spiritual earth and biblical earth) and below-the-earth.  Within the story there are four steps back in relative time (at 4:2, 12:1, 12:13 and 15:1). What happens as time passes (the time-line) in each space is highlighted by eighteen ‘time-parallels’, which are like text parallels but with a chronological component. The rule for creating the model is simple: verses within a space behave like beads on a piece of string – they can move up and down the time-line but they must not ‘jump over’ one another (otherwise they create paradoxes in the time-line).

This study uses a spatio-temporal methodology for Revelation that is (almost certainly) new to Theology, but it is not new to other disciplines.  The contexts, construction and interpretations of the model are given in the Towards …, Repetitions …, and Framework chapters.