Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse

"This book offers an extended essay in the history of biblical interpretation. Irena Backus examines the fate of the Apocalypse at the hands of early Protestants in three centers of the Reformation: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. Breaking away from the received view of the Reformation as a future-directed movement, she shows that the most important sixteenth-century reformed commentators of the Apocalypse of John remained heavily indebted to their patristic and medieval sources and were conservative in their estimation of the text's eschatological significance. Backus shows that the prevailing division of the text into seven sections, going back to Bede, meant that reformed commentators paid much greater attention to the trial and tribulations of the church, past and present, than to the imminence of the Last Judgment. Lutheran commentators, on the other hand, were more overtly future-oriented and emphasized the importance of the text for their era. Backus also offers new and significant information about methods of commenting on a biblical text that most reformers found rebarbative, sometimes to the point of questioning its canonicity." "This study focuses on theologians who commented on the Apocalypse in the period 1528-84 without commenting on the whole of the New Testament. As a result, several forgotten or unknown commentaries are brought to light here, particularly those of Antoine du Pinet, Leo Jud, Theodore Bibliander, Heinrich Bullinger, Nicolas Colladon, David Chytraeus, and Nicolaus Selnecker. By shedding new light on the place of the Apocalypse in the religious and cultural context of the Reformation, Backus makes an important contribution to the history of Christian thought in Europe. Her book is for scholars of theology, Reformation history, the history of biblical exegesis, and anyone interested in the Apocalypse of John and its reception in the West."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.