Horae Apocalypticae - The Parenthetic Visions

The Parenthetic Visions

Edward Elliott's historical approach meant he had difficulty explaining how these visions were a necessary and intrinsic part of the overall scheme of Revelation. In relating these new prophecies to world history, he was forced to go back over events with which he had already dealt. This created an unfortunate sense of redundancy and repetition. In his view, the writing within the sealed scroll dealt primarily with secular history whereas the writing on the outside dealt with ecclesiastical history. This recapitulation was necessary so that the reader could understand who the Beast was, a matter complicated by Edward Elliott's somewhat unusual insistence that there was only one Beast involved. This meant that the Beast from the sea, the Beast from the abyss, the Beast that killed the two witnesses, the dragon that menaced the woman in travail, the 'little horn' of Daniel 7: 7 - 14, the antichrist and the 'man of sin' from 2 Thessalonians 2: 1-12 were all manifestations of exactly the same entity. His best argument for this view was that, if they were not all identical, what became of them all? The Beast from the sea would seem still to be out there somewhere.

The use of a single Beast meant that only seven heads and ten horns needed to be identified once and for all. Edward Elliott, in common with other commentators of his day, was looking for forms of government, not individuals. The first five were agreed to be Kings, Consuls, Dictators, Decemvirs, and military tribunes. The sixth was emperors but it could not mean all emperors as this would mix Christians and pagans as component parts of the Beast. The solution came with the stated appearance of a diadem on the dragon's head. This pointed to the replacement of the traditional military-style emperor by an oriental-style absolute monarch and this happened under Diocletian who thus began the term of the seventh head. In its turn, this pagan head was wounded to the death by Theodosius' edict suppressing paganism. The eighth replacement head was to be the papacy. Elliott quoted Flavio Biondo "The princes of the world now adore and worship, as perpetual dictator, the successor not of Caesar but of the fisherman Peter: that is, the supreme pontiff, the substitute of the afore-mentioned emperor."

The ten horns are the Romano-Gothic kingdoms: the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Allemans, Burgundians, Bavarians, Vandals, Suevi, Heruli, Visigoths and Ostrogoths. The three horns required to be removed to fit Daniel were the Ostrogoths, the Vandals and the Lombards (sic) because they were a proximate threat to Rome.

Edward Elliott set out his view of how the papal antichrist developed. He believed it had reached its mature state by the First Council of Ephesus 431CE. Its began with a misuse of Matthew 16:18 to imply that Peter himself was the rock upon which the church was founded whereas the better sense was that he was instructed to build the church on the rock of the gospel. Historically, the church at Rome was founded upon Paul, not Peter who was unlikely to have been first bishop. Paul's description of the man of sin "sitting in the temple of God showing himself as God" was fulfilled by the pope sitting on the high altar at St Peter's to receive the adoration of the cardinals on his consecration day. Further, Jean Gerson's statement "The people think of the pope as the one God who has power over all things in heaven and earth" fulfilled Revelation 13:3 "All the world marvelled after the Beast." Lastly, the bull Unam Sanctam said that "it was essential to the salvation of every human being to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."