Revelation is a mystifying and dangerous book, as Timothy Beal makes clear in this short, but entertaining, scamper through the story of the composition and moments in the history of the most famous of apocalyptic texts. Beal argues that it is better to think of the Revelation ascribed to John not so much as a book but as a “multimedia constellation of images, stories, and story-shaped images” that “expands and contracts, with parts of it attaching to and detaching from other cultural artifacts within different media ecologies throughout history” (6). Beal's approach is that of a cultural historian who seeks to follow the “multiple, often competing, symbolic and material productions of the Bible—that is, biblical media—that are generated and generative in different cultural contexts” (5). The key to Revelation for Beal is recognizing what he calls its “generative incomprehensibility,” that is, how the book “is a revelation … of things that remain hidden, a seeing of things that remain unseeable” that “simultaneously demand and refuse visualization” (31). Thus, Beal compares Revelation to Dr. Frankenstein's monster, something stitched together from pieces of earlier texts, animated by some mysterious power (perhaps the force of the apocalyptic imagination), and mostly misunderstood.

The approach is certainly novel; the results mixed. Beal's perspective encourages him not to try to give a consecutive history of the uses of Revelation over the centuries (scarcely possible in a brief compass); rather, he casts his cultural searchlight over some selective examples of the impact of Revelation. After a chapter on the origins of the text, chapters are devoted to Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, and Joachim of Fiore. In his chapter on Augustine, Beal adverts to another feature of Revelation, its function as an othering machine into which an opponent is inserted in order to heighten his malignity and show that “this cosmos is not big enough for the two of us” (54; see also 134, 154, 200–204). This is certainly the case, but this aspect was not discovered by Augustine, being rather a formal feature of apocalyptic texts. Beal's snapshot approach encounters more problems in the second part of the book. Chapter 6 pits Luther's early dislike of Revelation against Cranach's popular illustrations of the text and declares victory for Cranach. Beal never mentions, however, that Luther changed his mind about Revelation in his new Preface to the 1530 German Bible, setting out an historicizing interpretation that was to have significant later influence. Also problematic is chapter 7, “New World of Gods and Monsters,” which deals with how Western colonizers identified pagan gods with the demons known from the Bible and Christian history, a story that has only marginal relation to Revelation. A chapter on contrasting Catholic and Protestant views of Revelation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have been more apropos. Other chapters are more interesting, especially that devoted to the African-American folk artist James Hampton's sculptural reenvisioning of “The Throne of the Third Heaven” (Rev. 4:1–4) now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.