Beginning of Essay
", n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing."1 The book of , the only apocalypse among the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, has always occupied a marginal role wit ....

Middle of Essay
.... as the consummation of the Reformation, as an elect nation with the potential to recreate the true church of the early Christians. Their intense belief in the imminence of the end of the world, however, along with the mode of interpretation which they applied to the , reflected trends in Christian thought redirected by Martin Luther, and largely ignored by John Calvin. In this paper I will examine Luthers role in three English interpretations of the , discussing both his influence as an intellectual precedent, and his appearance as a character within these texts. Luther himself never wrote a detailed commentary on the Apocalypse, but in a prefa ....