"And I saw the woman[1] drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (xvii. 6).
The persecution had been of long standing:
"I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast My name . . . even in those days wherein Antipas was My faithful martyr, who was slain among you" (ii. 13).
And the persecution is to continue:
"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer . . . be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (ii. 10).
Specially interesting from an historical point of view in this connexion of the testimony of the "Apocalypse" of S. John with the sleepless persecution to which the sect was subjected, is Professor Ramsay's exegesis of the words, "And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him (the beast) whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb" (xiii. 8), and "as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed" (xiii. 15).
"It is here implied that the persecutor is worshipped as a God by all people[2] except the Christians, and that the martyrs are slain because they do not worship 'the beast'—i.e. the Roman Emperor. Hence their refusal to worship 'the beast' and their witness to their own God, are united in one act; and this implies that the worship of 'the beast' (the Emperor) formed a test, the refusal of which was equivalent to a confession and witness. . . .
"The importance attached during this persecution to the worship of the Emperor, and the hatred of this special form of idolatry as the special enemy, have dictated the phrase addressed to the Church of Pergamos, 'Thou dwellest where
- ↑ The reference here is to pagan Rome, as "the woman drunken with blood"; so Mommsen quoted by Ramsay, who dwells on the fact that the death of the saints springs directly from their acknowledgment of their religion, and not for conviction for specific crimes.
- ↑ "The mind of the writer is practically restricted to the Roman world. . . . He thinks like a Roman that 'genus humanum' is the Roman world. The nations which did not worship the Roman Emperor were never present to his mind" (Ramsay, The Church in the Empire).
