he question of how Christians relate to other types of Jews is being struggled with. Matthew conceives of his Christianity as the prophetic fulfillment of Judaism; as many scholars have pointed out, his portrait of Jesus is intended to show that Jesus is indeed the promised ôprophet like Moses.ö The Sermon on the Mount, for example, is intended to parallel MosesÆ sermon from the side of Mount Sinai. Jesus ordains Simon Peter just as Moses ordains Aaron -- and, according to Mt 16:16-19, Jesus ordained Peter as a rabbi, for the language about binding and loosing is specifically rabbinic terminology (e.g., one is bound to obey the commandment to say morning prayers; having said them, one is loosed from the commandment). There were no bishops until about the year 90.
According to Josephine Ford, Revelation was written in three stages, separated by approximately twenty years each. One third was written from an essentially Jewish viewpoint, about the year 60; the next third from a viewpoint facing the struggle between Christian and non-Christian Jews, about the year 80; and the last third (which includes the letters to the seven churches at its beginning) from the viewpoint of a Christianity that has broken free of Judaism, about the end of the century. That is, this one document incorporates all three stages one can see for the other documents.
It is a commonplace of modern Biblical scholarship that one must understand the documents in the Bible in the same way that one would understand any other documents written in that era -- and that theological understanding must then build upon, not ignore, what can be known by ordinary rational scholarship. This point seems especially cogent for Revelation, since a great deal of what many would consider deviant forms of Christianity have been based on uninformed speculation about it. Our forebears in the ancient world thought Revelation a potentially dangerous book. It was long con...