When a Christian minister in Alberta who was running for office asserted that homosexuals would burn in a lake of fire, Christians got the reference, but it may have mystified Jews.

Was he threatening to dump them in one of the tar sands sludge pools or a similarly polluted river?

No, he was quoting a punishment promised by John of Patmos in his Book of Revelation, the last book in the Christian Bible and a source of similar apocalyptic threats for the last 2,000 years.

As the good pastor was fulminating against those he saw qualifying for this final swim, I was reading the new book by Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation.

Why would Jews have any interest in a Christian apocalyptic book? If not for the fact the minister was mouthing a despicable threat, we could pretty much ignore him.

A word about the book of Revelation: it was written by a Jewish Christian (although the term Christian had yet to be used) after the 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple and was directed at churches being formed in Asia Minor.

The Evil Empire to the author was Rome. The second enemy was those churches that, he felt, had strayed from the true faith. In her book, Pagels argues that, just as in other apocalyptic literature, John’s writings had political as well as theological overtones.

In his visions, while he is “in the spirit,” he foresees a terrible end of days when Rome will be vanquished, the faithful will be saved by a warrior Christ, and only the righteous will finally enjoy eternal bliss. Along the way, he has terrible punishments in store for the faithless and wicked, including that lake of fire and a terrible final conflict.

It’s this lake that some have reserved for the devil and all his angels, and to which the ministerial candidate would assign homosexuals.

Lest we think the author made this up out of whole cloth, we should note that John drew extensively on Jewish apocalyptic canonical sources such as Ezekiel and Daniel, and other Jewish writers not included in the Hebrew Bible, but well known in John’s era. Indeed, on Shavuot when we read from Habakkuk, we found the prophet’s vision of destruction and salvation in terms similar to John’s:

“{God’s} majesty covers the skies/ His splendour fills the earth…/ Pestilence marches before Him/ And plague comes forth at His heels/ When He stands, He makes the earth shake…/ You have come forth to deliver Your people/ To deliver Your anointed.”

The prophet was referring to the kingdom of Babylon, not Rome, as the enemy, but the sense of a terrible “day of the Lord” is clear.

For Isaiah, the end of days would see every nation come to the mountain of the Lord and worship in a restored Temple.

Two thousand years ago, other Jewish writers expected a war to the end – see the writings of the Dead Sea sect, for example. The Bar Kochba revolt was replete with messianic theology supported by Rabbi Akiva, among many others. That war’s terrible aftermath pretty much put an end to overt messianic fervour. Most rabbis who came to control the narrative were in no mood to condone further outbursts of apocalyptic fever.

However, according to Gershom Scholem, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, messianic longings and a vision of an apocalyptic upheaval continued to be found in Judaism. “Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theory of catastrophe,” he writes.

Messianic longings, and false messiahs, continued in Judaism. Even today, the idea that some one person may be the promised Messiah lingers. Elements within Israel regard the establishment of the state, as well as the “miraculous” recovery of old Jerusalem in 1967 and the territories, as a sign that the promised age of the Messiah is at hand.

So when we hear Christian claims that portents of the end are near (see the Left Behind series), we should acknowledge that within our own tradition there exists both the hope for a messiah and a belief that political events carry a hidden message.

Sadly, messianic claims for Jews have always ended in disaster. Also, to act on the assumption that political events will produce a messianic end will only continue to doom us to unrealistic expectations and bad, bad political choices.