This research provides an exegesis of Christ figured as the Lion and the Lamb in Revelation Chapter 5. The research will set forth the context in which this figuration appears in Revelation 5 and then critically discuss the significance of the imagery, with reference to the importance of Greek, as both language and culture, in shaping the text.
In order to understand the meaning of any New Testament text, it is essential to appreciate the historical context in which the books of the Bible, which is to say the authoritative voice of emergent Christianity, were made canonical. The process involved a wholesale transformation of religious sensibility as Greco-Roman influences overlapped and converged with Jewish tradition. The dynamics involved do not begin with the book of Revelation but are linked to it starting with the Acts of the Apostles, forming the context that in a sense prepares the way for the evangelical (= teaching) mission of the nascent ecclesiastical apparatus.
This does not mean that Revelation is linked only to Acts, as a cursory examination of the "miniconcordance," or numerous parallel Scriptural references and marginal readings that are in the center column of the traditional King James Bible. The present point is that Acts lays the socio-historico-cultural groundwork for explication of the emergent Christian faith. By the time of the Acts of the Apostles, the situation for the new religious sect is that the Jesus mission has been authorized by the events of the Redemption and has extended beyond the circle of Jews in Jerusalem "to a universal movement spreading throughout the Roman world" (Gochberg 599). If the Jewish covenant of former times claimed for Jewish morality a universal significance in the known world, the Christian reinterpretation of Jewish tradition claims universality on account of its ability to absorb Judaism in whole while also utterly transforming it with the power of a new spiritual idea emb...