The Apocalypse? Let’s put an end to this archaic notion

‘Few if any images in the Bible can compete for sheer power to evoke terror’: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, depicted here in Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1887 painting. From left: Death, Famine, War and Conquest, with the Lamb of God at top.

‘The apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible are fictions written after the event, and where the events they describe cannot be located in past history they are just imaginative fictions reflecting the prejudices, hopes and expectations of historical religious zealots.’

So writes Dr Paul McGrane in the final volume, Apocalypse Postponed: The real truth about the end of the world, of his remarkable trilogy, A Bonfire of Inanities: the Bible Dismantled.

It’s a further meticulous treatise of scholarly textual analysis — a laudably commonsensical and rational work that drills deep into the origin and intention of scriptural texts to demonstrate their falsity.

Apocalypse Postponed (Singular Books, April 2024) focuses on the Book of Revelation and Christian belief in imminent apocalypse, and shows how complete misunderstanding of Old and New Testament texts has led to centuries of ‘fallacious expectation’ and ‘apocalyptic lunacy’. Key apocalyptic themes are identified and located, not in our future, but in people and events contemporary with the writers of Revelation.

Dr McGrane offers cogent solutions to the riddles of the Beast of Revelation and his magic number 666 (actually 616, as it turns out), other Beasts, the Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, the seven…