[lbo-talk] Bible the most popular book in Amerika

[C. G. Estabrook]

Not just the Scholastics; both Erasmus and Luther (for different reasons) 
downplayed it as much as possible.  (For Luther it was as bad as James, the 
"epistle of straw.") Part of the problem was that it was written in a peculiar 
style -- indeed in a genre (apocalyptic) -- that existed only from the 2nd 
century BCE to the 2nd century CE in the Levant and was already archaic when the 
Apocalypse of John/Revelation was written.  But the real reason was probably the 
awkward political opinions that could be read into it a millennium and more 
after its composition.  --CGE

Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
> Revelations, however, is among the most over-estimated texts in world
> history; the scholastics almost threw it out of the canon, and their
> failure to do so is the blackest mark against them.
> 
> Carrol