How has the Book of Revelation been interpreted through Christian history?
The complexity of the structure of the book and the difficulty of interpreting it is something that many Christians have tried to deal with throughout the subsequent centuries. In part, it is maybe even more problematic because the expectations of John of an imminent overthrow of the Roman Empire within only three and a half years didn’t come to pass. The Roman Empire lasted for a great deal longer, so how do we understand this? How did Christians think about it, in the light of the fact that this claims to be a revelation from God himself given to John … ? Essentially we can think about the different ways that this book has been interpreted in Christian history as breaking out into two basic categories. First, symbolic interpretations [in which] all of the images, all of the elements in the story of John are merely symbols of the experiences of the Christian Church throughout its history, but with no specific implication for time. This is actually the view that will be taken by Sain
