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EPILOGUE "Let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret he has not chosen, in the very place where he lives, in the home of the inhabitant or the occupant, in the home of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he stays without saying no but without identifying himself as belonging to" (Derrida 1993: 81). Jacques Derrida employs the figurative language of "Marrano" to describe the human condition of living in the presence of death. If I may be permitted the refuge of metaphor, and debt to the Jews of Spain, I would figure the Apocalypse of John as a Marrano Jewish text. Like the Jews of Spain, John's Apocalypse has seen its Judaism hidden due to forces beyond its control. Like some of the Marranos, it has risen to a position of great influence that depends upon a denial of its origins. Like people, texts do not choose their origins or their afterlives, and when interpreters change the rules of the language games, texts and authors cannot say no from the grave. This is the history of the Apocalypse of John. The name of the genre of John's work is a summaryof its metanarrative: otJlOK(xX\)\yai<;—revelation—unveiling. It is also the metanarrative of my own reading as I attempt to uncover the formerly hidden Jewishness of John's own Revelation. John's Apocalypse explicitly undertakes to reveal "the things which are to come," but it also evinces a specific pattern of unveiling that is perhaps most indicative of the depth of its Judaism. The story of the Apocalypse is the story of coming to see the face of God. In a certain way,John's Apocalypse is a Merkabah text that moves from an early vision of the heavenly throne and the one who sits upon it that can only be described in terms of clear substances—glass, jewels, waters, things that in some way cannot be seen (Rev 4)—to a vision of the ark of the covenant in the heavenly temple (Rev 11:9), to the text's climax of actually seeing him who sits upon the throne and a promise that those who serve him will see his face (Rev 20:11; 22:4). This is a narrative and a promise made fully within Judaism—and so also isJohn's whole Apocalypse. ...

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