Proposed spatio-temporal
macrostructure of the book of Revelation

In the model below (Figures 1-5), the x axis is location and the y axis is relative time.  The location is the cosmic spaces (i.e. the universe, as it was generally understood in the Roman world in John’s era): the heavenly throne room, heaven’s environs, two earthly spaces (physical-spiritual earth and biblical earth) and below-the-earth.  Relative time begins at Creation and it flows down the page to the New Order.  Within each space, verses cannot ‘jump over’ each other – they behave like beads on a piece of string.  The dashed arrows show the narrative path and when John describes an event that happened in the story’s relative past, the arrows point up the page instead of down into the future. 
 
The same events are described from multiple perspectives because there are four steps back in relative time in the story (at 4:2, 12:1, 12:13 and 15:1).  These relocations split the chronologically linear Creation to New Order story-line into two linked dramas: 4:1-11:19 (Figures 1-3) and 12:1-22:2a (Figures 1-5).  These are overlain by a surface, literary spiral (16:12-21:8, Figures 4-5).  Repetitions, abrupt transitions and paradoxes are highlighted in eighteen ‘time-parallels’, which are like text parallels but with a chronological component.  Further details are given in the Towards … chapter.

An abductive insight: how the proposed spatio-temporal
macrostructure was uncovered

This study was inspired by a tremendous electric storm I saw at the end of an African valley.  The sheet lightning was a reminder of Revelation’s four horsemen, and if they had appeared, I would not have been at all surprised.  The second moment of inspiration for me was seeing the similarities between the written text and open sedimentary cores.  Verses look like small packets of words and a split core has little blocks of different sediments.  As an ex-marine geologist, I wondered if verses could be mapped, in the way sediments are mapped.  Interpreting Revelation is a multi-dimensional experience and thus began a spatio-temporal analysis of Revelation. 

The text below and the Sediment Core diagram are parts of Towards … Section 1b.

In Geology, unique events such as volcanic ash layers are traceable across a wide region and they provide a chronological link between the different locations.  An equivalent event in Revelation is the shedding of the blood of the Lamb (at the crucifixion), the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (i.e. the Cross) and the immediate impact of this would be synchronous across every dimension.  The repetitions of the immediate impact of the Cross, for example, suggested to me that the whole book is like a single, concatenated core containing layers from every location.  This is illustrated in the following diagram, in which a reader can work backwards from the concatenated core (the unfolding story in Revelation), to the individual core descriptions (what happens in each cosmic space), to the alignment of key events, like ash layers (events like the Cross), to the 3-dimensional mapping of the area (how the cosmic spaces relate to one another), i.e. the overview of the macrostructure of Revelation.  See Towards … 2 for the methodology used.

Page updated 30 October 2024