Richard Bauckham Quote

The images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book’s symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts and the whole.

Richard Bauckham

The images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book’s symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts and the whole.

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About Richard Bauckham

Richard John Bauckham (; born 22 September 1946) is an English Anglican scholar in theology, historical theology and New Testament studies, specialising in New Testament Christology and the Gospel of John. He is a senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
Bauckham is a prolific author of books and journal articles. In 2006, Bauckham published his most widely-read work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, a book that defends the historical reliability of the gospels. Bauckham argues that the synoptic gospels are based "quite closely" on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the Gospel of John is written by an eyewitness. This is against the predominant view that the four gospels were written later and not via interviews with direct eyewitnesses, but were rather the result of a longer chain of transmission of stories of Jesus filtered through early Christian communities over time.
The book was well-received, earning the 2007 Christianity Today book award in biblical studies and the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2009. Bauckham updated and expanded the book to respond to critics in a second edition, published in 2017.