The Language of Apocalypse

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw once described the Book of Revelation as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,” but then modern literati have had a penchant for unkindness when it comes to the language of the Apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence found what he called its “splendiferous imagery” to be “distasteful,” and hailed it “perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible.” Lawrence hated the book so much that he wrote a commentary on it. In his own monumental commentary on the Apocalypse, writing just a decade earlier than Lawrence, fellow Englishman R. H. Charles understood the book to be a product of linguistic incompetence and redactional ineptitude, egregious travesties that remained until modernity, when Charles corrected them with his own heavy-handed redaction and conjectured emendations.