Review of City of Gods: The New Jerusalem of John’s Revelation in Early Christianity

Betz, Nathan. City of Gods: The New Jerusalem of John’s Revelation in Early Christianity. VCS 186. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2025, pp. 544, $157.00, hardback.

A student of theology not formally acquainted with early authors should look somewhere else for a general overview of patristic eschatology, but for the scholar interested in how the Apocalypse of John was received in the early church this is a splendid work. Betz’s work should be applauded for the rigor with which he treats each author.

Of all Christian compositions, few rival the Apocalypse’s ability to inspire an immense variety of interpretations. Among its cornucopia of imagery, the vision of the New Jerusalem captivated its patristic interpreters, stimulating some writers to identify the city not only with the church but with individuals such as Paul of Tarsus and––surely to the joy of some and protestation of others––Origen of Alexandria. Regardless of what one makes of the Revelation of John, it is easy to agree with Jerome that it “has as many secrets as words.”

Nathan Betz has limited himself to the study of the “reception and elaboration of the New Jerusalem in early Christian texts that draw on the New Jerusalem of Revelation” (5). Reception history is a favored currency in the guild, enabling scholars to discuss the material, cultural, and historical processes by which a subject was produced and transmitted, rather than investigate a supposedly uninterpreted reality behind the text. He does not intend to uncover what the figure of the New Jerusalem meant as such, but what it has meant, with the benefit that the latter may redound to the former. What follows is a comprehensive tour from 96–313AD, from, that is, the supposed (and contested) composition of the Apocalypse until the Pax Constantiniana (6). For no other reason than its infamous cryptadia, a reception-critical approach is a welcome addition to study of the Apocalypse.

Three sets of interests motivate Betz’s research: first, how the earliest readers of the Apocalypse understood the “fundamental meaning and significance” of the New Jerusalem”; second, the question of philology (in the Nietzschean sense) wherein sources and influences are traced and addressed; third, investigation into the topoi that emerge in the authors’ interpretations of the New Jerusalem (11). This expansive tour ushers the reader from Papias, to Lactantius, pausing to think alongside the likes of Melito, Irenaeus, Origen and his reception in Gregory Thaumaturgus, as a few examples, and alongside movements like the Montanists and hagiographies such as the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitas. While the pace may at first seem breathless, Betz’s reconstructions––sometimes striking against the status quaestionis––are offered with clarity and detail.

A major contribution Betz’s monograph makes is its catalogue of sources. Quite simply, no sustained history of interpretation has ever been performed on the New Jerusalem. A few reflections are in order. First, crucially, Betz demonstrates that the persistent relegation of interpreters before Origen to a univocally millennialist gathering is unfounded in the sources. “Very nearly all the authors who have a discernable view…”, he writes, “seem to personally embrace more than a single interpretation” of the city (458, emphasis author’s). All interpreters ultimately understood in the figural metropolis the image of “God’s people in some form of intimacy or union with him” (200), complicating any description of authors within the second and early third centuries that would reduce them to titles like “millennialist.” Positions we would assume are naturally combative (litterale contra allegoricum) coexist within authors of diverse geographical and cultural inheritances.

Nathan Betz has limited himself to the study of the “reception and elaboration of the New Jerusalem in early Christian texts that draw on the New Jerusalem of Revelation” (5). Reception history is a favored currency in the guild, enabling scholars to discuss the material, cultural, and historical processes by which a subject was produced and transmitted, rather than investigate a supposedly uninterpreted reality behind the text. He does not intend to uncover what the figure of the New Jerusalem meant as such, but what it has meant, with the benefit that the latter may redound to the former.

Rather than seeing chiliasm as the core feature of the period prior to the Alexandrians, it is the coordination of Ps 82 with Rev 21 to which Cyprian’s Testimonies witness, “a tradition that is on both sides” of geographical and linguistic differences (462). This tradition––that the inhabitants of the eschatalogical city will be deified human beings, “sons of God”; “God in the congregation of gods”––extends through writers as various as Irenaeus, Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen (cf. 200). Origen says, after all, that you die a human being and awaken a god (Hom. Ps. 67.1.5). Looking closely, Cyprian’s interpretations of the New Jerusalem are “hardly different in kind from those advanced by Origen” (457). In any case, that the New Jerusalem served as a figure for the union of humanity and divinity across regions assumed to differentiate hermeneutical practices reframes manufactured polarities between East and West.

Betz brings to the fore that even for writers of a particularly millennialist fervor, more often than not an ecclesiological or mystical sense obtains in their readings of the New Jerusalem. Betz’s treatment of Meltio is paradigmatic. While one may not agree with every tenet of his reconstruction, in my view it largely holds, with the result that Melito proves the existence of an “early spiritualizing reading” which most likely precedes him (108–9). I agree with Betz that his examination of the prevalence of spiritual readings may well “contribute to an understanding of the very text of Revelation itself presenting not a literal, but rather a spiritual and even allegorical, New Jerusalem” (92). It should not be forgotten that not only Philo but Paul proposed an allegorical reading of Jerusalem (196). Would it not be appropriate that the richest treasures of the Christian arcana, visions of the deified humanity walking with God as gods, were housed in the Scriptures’ final pages?

One limit of Betz’s monograph that will control its target audience is the brevity of its conclusion. Having surveyed such a vast amount of literature, I was left wishing that Betz outlined at greater length what it would mean to understand “the very text of Revelation itself.” He does not. The reader should not look for criteria for the plausibility of one of the interpretations catalogued. It is, as it was intended to be, a reception history of the patristic reception of the New Jerusalem, not a synthesis. A student of theology not formally acquainted with early authors should look somewhere else for a general overview of patristic eschatology, but for the scholar interested in how the Apocalypse of John was received in the early church this is a splendid work. Betz’s work should be applauded for the rigor with which he treats each author. Prized scholarly volumes are supposed to launch further discussion, debate, and synthesis; for this, Betz’s volume should indeed be prized.