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Apocalypse, an uncovering, is formally linked to three religions in this atlas: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Read against its own description, that is a partial differentiation rather than a full one. Two of the three get real, distinct content. The third gets none at all.

A Genre Judaism and Christianity Share From the Start

"The word means an uncovering. It names a kind of writing, current in Judaism and early Christianity from roughly the third century before the common era, in which a seer is shown what is normally hidden, the structure of history, the heavenly court, the end, usually through a guiding angel, usually in extravagant symbol, and usually under the name of an ancient worthy rather than the actual author. Daniel, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra and the Revelation of John belong to it." The genre "characteristically arises under pressure," telling a community under a power it cannot resist "that the power is temporary and that the outcome is already decided," its outlandish imagery doing political work under cover.

Four Christian Readings and an Argument Over a Thousand Years

Christianity alone is elaborated at length beyond the shared genre. "Christian reading of Revelation has divided into four broad approaches which are still in use: that it describes events of the writer's own time, that it maps the whole course of church history, that it describes a still-future crisis, or that it presents recurring patterns rather than a schedule. Cutting across these is the argument about the thousand years of chapter 20, whether Christ returns before it, after it, or whether it is the present age of the church figuratively described, which is Augustine's position in the City of God and the majority Catholic and Reformation view."

Islam's Link Carries Nothing

Islam is the third of the three religions counted on Apocalypse's own links, and its link carries no note. Nothing in its own description mentions Islam at all, an omission this essay reports rather than fills. The description does note, separately, that the modern popular sense of the word, meaning the disaster itself rather than the uncovering, "is a late secular development" with "almost nothing to do with the word."

Where To Read More

• ApocalypseLast ThingsThe genre itself; two of three counted religions differentiated, the third bare
• JudaismAbrahamic (Monotheistic)Credited jointly with Christianity as the genre's point of origin
• ChristianityAbrahamic (Monotheistic)Elaborated at length: four interpretive schools of Revelation and the millennium debate
• IslamAbrahamic (Monotheistic)The third counted religion; its edge and its own description carry nothing for it