The conflict with Rome

Jesus’ apocalyptic vision appears not to reach beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and the establishment of the church in the Gentile world. Paul, however, foresees ‘wrath’ against both Israel and Rome (cf. Rom.2:9). The destruction of the fourth beast in Daniel’s prophecy, which appears originally to have been an allusion to Greece, is reused as an image for the defeat of imperial Rome: ‘the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur’ (Rev.19:20). Paul’s description of the defeat of the ‘man of lawlessness’ (2 Thess.2:8) has the same reference. The interpretive key to this difficult passage is also to be found in the later chapters of Daniel. A detailed parallelism emerges between these two apocalyptic texts which suggests that Paul envisaged an ‘end-time’ dénouement centred on Jerusalem: the religious collapse of the Jews, the resistance mounted by faithful believers and their eventual removal, and the eruption of an extreme lawlessness from the heart of Roman imperialism, culminating in the parousia of the Lord Jesus. The power that brings about the overthrow of Rome, however, is simply the ‘word of God’, the preaching of the gospel (2 Thess.2:8; Rev.19:13, 15; cf. Eph.6:17).