When I read the Book of Revelation, it played out as if it was some religious movie that involved with Jesus as well as a large cast of characters. I never directly involved myself with Christian material such as the Bible, but I could see why people who had prior experience with reading the Bible could benefit from reading the Book of Revelation. There seemed to be a lot of references to characters and in fact, it’s the last book of the New Testament, so expecting that whoever read the bible were to have read it in order, the reader would’ve been accustomed to almost every character. Therefore, I don’t think I fully understood the deeper meaning behind the text since it pretty much took it for face value.
Kirsch seemed to fuse both religious themes and historic significance between certain items in the Bible. For example, in chapter two, he lists the messiahs that the Jews used to believe and the one that would eventually be known as Jesus (46-48). He also uses references to other books within the Bible in order to show an ideal messiah, and tying that in to the history of the previous messiahs when Jews and Greeks were in conflict, one could speculate that certain books in the Bible are trying to glorify a messiah’s role (49). I admire how he is able to use history and religion to show “why” certain things were shown. Also, while I read the Book of Revelation, the video game Halo popped up into my head because of its constant use of the number seven. Nevertheless I like Kirsch’s ability to balance religion and history without preaching to the reader.
I’m sure it’ll come up later on, but your talking of Halo reminds me that there actually is a “Left Behind” video game that was released and was pretty controversial, because there were issues of how (if I remember correctly) players have to “attack” or defeat other characters in a kind of violent way as well.