The Unveiling

Revelation, translated from the Greek and from what its words meant to the people who first heard them — without help from any English version, and without the interpretive systems that grew up around this book centuries later.

The thing that surprised me first

Revelation never quotes the Hebrew scriptures. Not once. There is no “as it is written”, no formula, no citation — in twenty-two chapters, not a single formal quotation. This is remarkable, because the same book alludes to those scriptures more densely than anything else written in its century. This translation marks 195 of those echoes so far, in 258 of the book’s 405 verses, and there are probably more we have not found yet.

So marking every place the text formally quotes another passage would have given us almost nothing to mark — not a sparse page, but a count near zero for the whole book. Instead the green numbers mark echoes: places where John’s Greek tracks specific wording from the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures closely enough that the source can be identified from the words themselves rather than from a later editor’s cross-reference table.

Names, and the instruction in the first sentence

The book describes its own method before it starts. What John received, it says, was made known through signs — esēmanen, from the word for a signal. That is a request about how to read, made in the second sentence, and one of the things this text signs with is names. It calls a woman in Thyatira “Jezebel”, and a city “Babylon”, and expects the reader to follow.

So where a name carries a meaning, the notes give it, and where two names are built from the same parts and set side by side, they say so. The limit I have kept is that the name has to be doing something in the passage — standing next to something, or picked up by the text itself — before its meaning counts as an argument. Otherwise every name in a very long book becomes available for anything, which is how a reading stops being checkable.

How the margins work

Verse numbers are in the left margin, faint, out of the way of the sentences. Nothing interrupts the reading column. Markers in the right margin open where they stand.

Green marks an echo of the Hebrew scriptures. Blue marks cultural background — what a first-century reader in these particular cities knew that we do not. Grey marks a translation decision worth showing you, including the places where the Greek is genuinely ambiguous and I had to choose. Words with a dotted underline open the Greek behind them. Purple appears in chapters 2 and 3 only, and is explained below.

Gold, marked ! rather than a number, is different in kind from the other three. Those report what the words do. A gold note goes past them into what the passage might mean — and it is kept in its own colour, and out of the numbered sequences, so that no reader has to guess which sort of claim they are being handed. Keeping the line visible is what lets the other three be trusted.

Gold is also where this book gets read against the rest of scripture. The other books were never outside sources here — in Greek and Hebrew they are primary ones, and reading a book whole, letting its end inform its beginning, is a good deal older than the interpretive systems this translation keeps out. What the green markers ask for is a verbal echo you can check for yourself. That is a standard for what earns a numbered marker, not a limit on how far a reading may reach.

The seven letters are a different case

Chapters 2 and 3 are not vision. They are dictated letters, addressed by name to seven assemblies that existed, in cities you could walk to — communities with teachers, with leaders, and with writings of their own. Ephesus is the clearest case. Paul spent three years there, called its elders out to Miletus to say goodbye to them, and the letter that carries the city’s name is addressed to it. So while the rest of the book is read against the Hebrew scriptures, these two chapters can also be read against what those particular readers already had in front of them. Jesus is speaking here to people who had been taught, and who could be expected to recognise what they had been taught.

That loosens nothing. Green still means the Hebrew scriptures and nothing else. But a link to the later writings is worth being able to see, so in these two chapters it has a colour of its own. Purple marks wording a letter shares with the writings its readers already held. It appears nowhere else in the book, because nowhere else in the book are those writings a source, and the build refuses a purple marker outside chapters 2 and 3. Where the link is a judgement rather than shared wording — what a community held, what a resemblance is worth — it still goes in gold. The long example is the note at 2:5: what Paul left that assembly, and what the letter says they let go of.

There turned out to be more of this than I expected. Scanning the seven letters against the rest of the Greek New Testament found matches in every one of them, and some are exact. The refrain that closes all seven — if you have ears, listen — is the line He used on the crowds after a parable, the same three words in the same order. Smyrna is told it is poor and yet rich, Laodicea that it is rich and yet poor, and both halves sit in one sentence of Paul’s about a Lord who was rich and became poor. Pergamum and Thyatira are charged with two of the four things the letter from Jerusalem had told the assemblies to keep away from — food offered to idols and sexual unfaithfulness — named together, in both orders.

What I take from that is not mainly a point about sources. It is that He spoke to each of these places in words they already had — their own teachers’ vocabulary, and their own streets’. Jesus meets people where they are. That is what the blue markers keep showing in a different way, and it is what the whole book is doing when it speaks in the images of the Hebrew prophets.

One thing worth knowing while reading these two chapters — the base text used here brackets the words “in Ephesus” in the first line of the first letter, because they are not in all of the oldest copies.

Red text, which is switched off

The red is off by default, because it did not survive contact with the book. Chapters 2 and 3 are almost nothing but speech, so marking it turns several pages solid red, and a wall of coloured text is harder to read rather than easier. The switch is in the sidebar if you want it back — the marking is all still there underneath. The indented passages show you where the dictated letters run in any case.

The rule behind the marking, for when it is on. Ancient manuscripts have no quotation marks, so the boundaries of speech are an editorial judgement in every edition ever printed. The rule here is conservative: red only where the text itself signals that Jesus is speaking. Where a voice is unattributed — and in this book that happens often, with voices from the throne, from the altar, from messengers, sometimes mid-sentence — the text stays black and a grey note says why.

Red ink is not a modern publishing convention, incidentally. Scribes used minium, a red lead pigment, to mark headings and significant text; the practice is called rubrication, and it is where we get the word “rubric”. The green and blue on this page are verdigris and lapis — the other two pigments a scribe would have had on the desk.

What I could not do

The rule was to use no other translations and no modern theology, and I have kept to it in the sense that matters: no English version was consulted, and no interpretive framework has been allowed to decide a word. But a fully clean room is not possible and I would rather say so. Every lexicon is downstream of centuries of translating, and so is my own sense of these words. Where a choice is genuinely contested, the grey notes say so instead of hiding it.

All twenty-two chapters are here, from the opening vision to the last words. That makes this a complete second draft and nothing more settled than that: the wording is under active revision, several renderings have already changed more than once, and the places where a choice is contested are marked in grey rather than hidden. Nor is it an authority: each reader can decide for themselves what the scriptures say, and whether my arguments hold. The notes are set out so that you can check them.