Nathan Betz: Ideas on the Move. The Case of Revelation’s “New Jerusalem” in Asia, Rome, Alexandria, and Carthage

• Centre for Advanced Studies
• Novum Testamentum Patristicum

Every great city demands a worthy account. The New Jerusalem, the holy city described at the end of John’s Revelation (chs. 21–22) and taken up by countless generations of Christian and non-Christian thinkers alike, has until recently gone without such an account. My recently-submitted doctoral dissertation was designed to fill this gap. In it, I attempted to understand the earliest Christian conceptions of this vivid figure and to situate them, their rise, and their development within the theological-historical conditions that brought them forth from the time that Revelation was written until the dawn of the Pax Constantiniana. In this presentation, I trace how various interpretations of the New Jerusalem emerged in early second-century Asia (e.g. Papias of Hierapolis, Melito of Sardis), and then spread to Rome (e.g. Hermas, Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus), from whence competing hermeneutical approaches were adopted simultaneously in Latin-speaking Carthage (e.g. Tertullian, De duobus montibus Sina et Sion, Lactantius) and Greek-speaking Alexandria (e.g. Clement, Origen). By the time that Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in ca. 313, the geographical movement of interpretations of the New Jerusalem had had the far-reaching (and unanticipated) effect of solidifying the status of the book of Revelation in the Latin West while gradually undermining its authority in the Greek East.