Towards a new
spatio-temporal
macrostructure for the book of Revelation
New views on an old mystery
This chapter is called ‘Towards’ a new macrostructure of the book of Revelation because it is an introduction to the proposed spatio-temporal methodology and macrostructure for the book of Revelation that may be new to Theology. It is a literary-historical, exegetical analysis of the text and its aim is to provide and interpret a reproducible model for Revelation’s structure that others might wish to use for their own interpretations. It is concerned with the relationships between the passages based upon their subject matter, rather than what the characters or events might represent – although there are a few thoughts on this in the Framework 4.
The study proposes that Revelation’s description of the cosmos controls the structure of the text, and it can be translated into a modern metaphor or mental image: the spacetime continuum. The cosmic spaces in the proposed model are the heavenly throne-room, heaven’s environs, two earthly spaces (physical-spiritual earth and biblical earth) and below-the-earth. Within the visionary cosmos, time is assumed to move in one direction only (into the future). Using this spatio-temporal methodology, the macrostructure of Revelation reflects a single Creation to the New Order story, but it contains four steps back in relative time (at 4:2, 12:1, 12:13 and 15:1). Using this methodology, the macrostructure of Revelation reflects a single Creation to the New Order story which contains four steps back in relative time (at 4:2, 12:1, 12:13 and 15:1). These relocations result in a cosmic journey containing two linked dramas (from 4:1 and 12:1) and a surface, literary spiral (16:12-21:9). What happens as time passes in each space (time-lines) highlight eighteen ‘time-parallels’, which are like text parallels but with a chronological component.
This chapter tells the story of how the proposed macrostructure was uncovered and it considers the methodology and how the proposed model relates to published macrostructures.
1) Introduction
The study began as an essay on the structure of Revelation for a theological MA and the background research began in two ways: reading how others understood the structure of Revelation (see the following Macrostructure section) and repeatedly reading and listening to recordings of the book.
Listening to the recordings encouraged my interest in how John may have experienced the vision(s) and prepared his manuscript. What happens in each space, are events repeated and does more than one event occur at any one time? Revelation is an apocalyptic (revealing) prophecy (word from God), wrapped in the story of John’s event-driven visionary journey through the cosmos and described in a letter. Did John write about his vision experience(s) or was Revelation a hybrid of divine inspiration and imagination? These questions led to three approaches: an interest in the historical setting of Revelation; a spatio-temporal analysis of the text; and consideration of the theological implications of the text. There is one hypothesis: the book of Revelation has a structure that can be recognised today. Comparing every literary, linguistic or ideological model for Revelation is outside the scope of this study, so the present author encourages others to map their preferred macrostructure onto a cosmic setting and compare it with the proposed model.
1a) Genre
Revelation is an apocalyptic (revealing) prophecy (word from God), wrapped in the story of John’s visionary journey through the cosmos, and described in an open letter which contains seven messages (2:1-3:22) to individual Christian groups in Asia (present-day Turkey). It follows a common pattern for New Testament letters, with the introduction containing the main themes of the body of the letter in ‘seed form’ (1:1-3:22) (or ‘even’ 1:1-20, Beale, 1999: 39). The letter ends with closing words in the vision and an epilogue (22:6-21).
1b) An abductive insight - how the macrostructure was uncovered
My interest in Revelation began when I was sitting on an African hillside when the sky darkened, the man and child on the hillside opposite stopped talking, and an electric storm filled the sky at the end of the valley. Sheet lightning and thunder continued for about half an hour; there was no rain. If four horsemen had appeared in the sky, I would not have been at all surprised – such was the cultural impact of the book of Revelation on an ordinary English person witnessing such power for the first time. When I came to study the book many years later, and I had the opportunity to visit the island of Patmos, it was easy to imagine John looking down the very small valley in front of him and the scene opening up to reveal something analogous to a cosmic, electric storm to end all storms.
John describes his experience of a vision that he had on Patmos when he was praying one Lord’s Day (1:9-10). The vision is described in cosmic terms, with its setting on the earth, in heaven’s throne room and its environs, and at the boundary between earth and below-the-earth. The abyss and earth opening, and the fiery lake are boundary events; caves and craters of active volcanoes (fiery, sulphurous lakes) were considered to be entrances to below-the-earth in John’s era and John does not enter or see into below-the-earth. Revelation follows the earthly concept of chronological time by describing several series of events which have a beginning, middle and end, and John is told to write ‘what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later’ (1:19).
Reading about the cosmic locations described in Revelation and how time passes in the story, as an ex-marine geologist I wondered if these visionary locations could be mapped. Especially since seeing the verses written in the Bible reminded me of sedimentary cores, with each verse equivalent to a sedimentary layer. In Geology, unique events such as volcanic ash layers are traceable across a wide region and they provide a chronological marker between different locations. An equivalent event in Revelation is the shedding of the blood of the Lamb (the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, i.e. the Cross). The immediate impact of the Cross, for example, would be synchronous across every dimension, with the ‘golden spike’ in heaven’s throne-room. These thoughts became a spatio-temporal analysis of the book of Revelation.
Repeated descriptions of unique events suggested to me that the whole book is like a single, concatenated sedimentary 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 such as 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.
1c) Spatio-temporal mapping
The proposed macrostructure recognises the setting of Revelation as a multi-dimensional cosmos within which John describes events with spatial (heaven, earth, below-the-earth) and temporal (past, present, future) dimensions which can be mapped. Mapping is an inter-disciplinary method which is established in Theology but it is not used here to represent limitless ‘overlays’ of meaning or literary maps of ‘boundary transformations in (… John’s) multi-dimensional world’, as suggested by Leonard Thompson (Thompson, 1990: 187), or monsters (therefore a monster itself, Pippin, 2020; 185); this study uses geological-style mapping which sees Revelation as an overview of God’s territory that puts characters and events into a cosmic and temporal perspective.
This analysis includes a chronological dimension of literary units, such as verses or passages, and it is rare in Theology – perhaps unique. This type of spatio-temporal analysis maintains the relationships between location and relative time. In literary terms in Revelation, verse order remains unchanged so verses behave like beads on a piece of string within each visionary cosmic space. In both Geology and Theology, the structure is independent of notations and interpretation.
This study translates the setting of the story within Revelation into its modern equivalent: the spacetime continuum as a modern metaphor or mental image for John’s visionary cosmos. This is a non-physicist’s interpretation that John would have recognised: the cosmos is a 3-dimensional volume and the passing of time moves in one direction only, like an arrow into the future; and consequences follow causes. The few simple rules for this type of analysis are outlined in the following Methodology section.
1d) Time-lines and time-parallels
In both Theology and Geology, what happens before and after a unique event helps build a picture of the sequence of events (a time-line) within each space; disturbances within a linear pattern define the macrostructure. In Revelation, three unique events (the Cross, fall of Babylon and the Final Judgement) are traceable across the cosmic spaces – they are like ash layers in Geology. I call them ‘time-parallels’ and they are like text parallels but they have a chronological component. Eighteen time-parallels are recognised – see the Macrostructure Model for the figures mentioned and they are described in detail in the Framework chapter.
In Revelation, disturbances within a linear pattern (such as repetitions) suggest John saw some unique events several times. These different descriptions would only be possible if the story stepped back in time on its journey through the cosmos. Comparing subject matter, location and relative time for each verse, it is likely that Revelation tells a single story (from Creation to the New Order) that steps back in time at 4:2, 12:1, 12:13 and 15:1 within it (see Towards … 4f). Superimposed upon the linear story-line is a text spiral (16:12-21:9) that describes events from just before the fall of Babylon to the descent of the New Jerusalem.
Support for this kind of approach comes from Leonard Thompson, who provides a spatio-temporal analysis of Revelation in which he describes it as if it is a landscape seen ‘as from an airplane’ with fields and boundaries that delineate distinctions between different sorts of spaces. For Thompson, these spaces reflect John’s literary and social world as centre-less, bound-less multi-dimensional ‘laminated overlays’ of meaning (Thompson, 1990: 76, 187-188) and Time is like a hill (‘a “topographical” arrangement in space’) so time and space are related coordinates in this transcendental ‘map’ (Thompson, 1990: 84-86). Steven Friesen considered Thompson’s book (especially his emphasis on boundaries) to be groundbreaking (Friesen, 2001: 161) and it was very influential in this study also. This study considers the geography of Revelation, but as a basis for its structure like a geological model rather than an ideological study.
1e) Spatial approaches
There are spatial analyses of Revelation that do not have a chronological temporal dimension. For example, for Steven Friesen time is defined by its ‘qualities’, such as ‘vision time’ (ecstatic experience) is mediated in ‘worship time’ (which spans heaven and earth) and there are similar era-related times (Friesen, 2001:157-161). Michael Gilbertson uses ‘temporal categories’ (‘present’, ‘primordial’ and ‘historical past’, ‘penultimate future’ and ‘ultimate future’) but he rejects an active chronological component (Gilbertson, 2003:110-111).
Post-structuralist approaches, such as Critical Spatial Theory and Geocriticism, also minimise the temporal dimension or consider it from a cultural perspective. Critical Spatial Theory emphasises the nature of space as a product of human relationships or activity (Kilde, 2013: 194) and Geocriticism considers literary texts as maps which reveal ‘aesthetic as well as political dimensions’ (Pippin, 2020:187). In the proposed macrostructure, the chronology is as important as the spatial component of the story so these approaches are not part of this study.
1f) Revelation's overview
Revelation is an account of a vision the author, who gave his name as John, wrote that he had whilst on the island of Patmos ‘because of the word of God’ (1:9), probably in the second half of the first century A.D. Patmos is a Greek island today, about 30 km off the Turkish coast. John’s identity is unknown; some think he was the disciple John, who wrote the fourth Gospel, others think he was John the Elder, who wrote two of the Johannine letters, or he was an otherwise unknown elder and/or prophet who lived in Ephesus (see the ‘Who was John?’ link below).
John may have been exiled to Patmos under Roman Emperors Nero or Domitian in the late 60’s or mid 90’s A.D. (Osborne, 2002: 2-9). If the vision occurred in A.D. 95-97, i.e. accepting as truth Irenaeus’ comment that Revelation was written towards the end of Domitian’s reign (Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.30.3) some of the first audiences may have experienced the fear of Nero’s cruelty and persecution (late A.D. 60’s), fled from the first Jewish-Roman war (A.D. 66-70), known the temple and Jerusalem had been destroyed (A.D. 70) and they were recovering from oppression under Domitian. If an earlier date is correct (A.D. 68-70; Hengel, 1989: 126-127), Nero’s persecutions would be a recent memory and Jerusalem was still standing, but under threat.
Revelation’s book outline summarises what John wrote, in verse order, and Adela Yarbro Collins comments: ‘There are almost as many outlines of the book as there are interpreters.’ (Collins, 1976: 8) but the following outline is typical for Revelation:
1:1-3:22 Introduction: prologue and Revelation’s vision begins with one-like-a-son-of-man (a visionary Warrior) standing behind John when he was praying and he (John) turns around (1:12) when the Warrior talks with him. Messages to seven congregations in Asia are dictated to John by the Warrior.
4:1-11:19 John is transported in the spirit from earth into heaven’s throne-room (4:1-2). The slain Lamb appears (5:6): he takes a sealed scroll from the one seated on the throne (5:7); the seven seals are opened (6:1-8:1); seven trumpets sound (8:2-11:15) and earth is tormented. John witnesses the impact on earth of the breaking seals and he is certainly on earth again by 10:8). The heavenly sanctuary opens (11:19).
12:1-18 the story of satan and humanity: the Lamb assumes his authority; satan attacks the Lamb’s followers.
13:1-18 satan’s abyss beast and earth beast appear
14:1-20 the Lamb appears on Mt Zion (v.1), as one-like-a-son-of-man (v.14); three angels’ messages; harvests.
15:1-19:4 the seven bowls’ torments; armies gather at Armageddon; Babylon is destroyed; heaven rejoices.
19:5-20:15 the Lamb’s wedding celebration; the Rider defeats satan; the Millennium; final war; final judgement.
21:1-22:21the New Order replaces the old cosmos; Jesus stresses the value of the vision (22:16); epilogue.
The book outline describes John’s visionary journey through the cosmos but the vision outline describes the Creation to New Order story-line within the book. This study investigates the relationship between the two.
The shorter Repetitions chapter focuses on the problems raised for macrostructures in Revelation by the abrupt transitions, paradoxes and repetitions. The Framework chapter defines and interprets the eighteen time-parallels.
Page updated 22 February 2026