Revelation symbolism is not a code with a single key. Every image in the last book of the Bible was borrowed from somewhere older, and the readers John wrote for recognised the borrowing. These articles take the book piece by piece and ask what each vision would have meant to a first-century church living under Rome, before asking what it has meant since.

The structure comes first. The seven seals open the drama, the seven trumpets sound over a world already breaking, and the seven bowls of wrath finish it. The four horsemen ride out of the first four seals, and the letters to the seven churches tell you which congregations were meant to hear all of it.

Then the figures. The beast is assembled entirely out of Daniel, and the variant reading 616 has as much manuscript weight behind it as the famous number. Babylon is a city with a real address, and the woman clothed with the sun has been read as Mary, as Israel and as the church itself.

The end of the book is not destruction but a city: the New Jerusalem comes down finished, with no temple in it. For the whole apocalypse read straight through with commentary beside the text, see The Book of Revelation.