Originally Posted By: David Snyder
When someone posts a song about the Book of Revelation this specific, people are going to have opinions.


Ya, thanks. Not quite "Revelation" (until later in the thread) but same themes.

I studied the New Testament in college, from the "redaction criticism" perspective of trying to figure out what texts derive from what other texts, and what lost texts precede everything we have.

We talked about what happens when people expect the world to end and the world doesn't end. The early Christians specifically expected Jesus to return before the last of the first generation died off, and it was a big problem for them at the time, there was much argument about what Jesus meant when he said he'd be back. You can see it playing out in the texts, it's just like social media, there's somewhere that says, "Some say Jesus said he'd be back before they died, but he never said THAT, not exactly."

It has been suggested that the "cognitive dissonance" caused by the failure of the world to end triggered, ironically, a counter-wave of proselytism without which Christianity might simply have fizzled out.