Settle down, now! Only a very few people take those numbers literally, and the ones that do seem inconsistent even to other folks who take other things literally. For instance, if you take the 144,000 literally, then you’ve got to deal with the fact that they’re all Israelites, which is awkward for Gentiles who think they’re going to heaven, not to mention you’ve got this giant Lamb you’ve got to take literally as well…

No, most Biblical scholars take all those numbers symbolically as all get out. 144,000 is merely the biggest, completest number the ancients could expresss — 12 X 12 X 1000, or perfect number X perfect number X A LOT MORE, just for good measure.

Anyhow, I come at the thing all differently. To me, John of Patmos wasn’t reading the will of G*D in his prophecies. Rather, he was warning against the way Christianity was fermenting right around the time of the reign of the emperor Domitian (81–96 C.E.), because the emperor was starting to demand a lot of concessions in the way of emperor-worship. In other words, John is writing about the age-old struggle between G*D and empire. (He’s just doing it in the most hallucinatory way imaginable. But he comes by that honestly, too, because he draws on Hebrew Bible sources for much of his apocalyptic imagery.)

And his message is this: if you don’t live right; if you continue to worship the false gods your hands have made, your world will turn to crap.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years — Christianity DID succumb to the empire; people DID continue to worship the “gods their hands have made”; and now we have a garbage patch the size of Texas in the Pacific and catastrophic climate change.

Overly simplistic? Sure.

All I’m saying is that the best prophets aren’t wrong, if you move your timeline out long enough and squint your eyes. Because the best prophets don’t have to know G*D, or the future, or anything like that. They just have to know people. And in that case, Paul was dead right, because the same thing happens every time your beautiful new counter-cultural faith, your kindom of heaven which is within you, gets co-opted by the ones who want to exploit it and use it to set themselves up nicely. It’s only a matter of time before somebody’s making a killing off those loaves and fishes.

That’s just my opinion, though. I could be wrong.

Thanks, Paul.