Book of Revelation (Apocalypse)

The Apocalypse of St John the Theologian, the last book of the New Testament: a prophetic vision of the end, of the struggle between good and evil, and of the final victory of Christ. It is the one book of the New Testament never appointed to be read in the services of the Byzantine rite, an absence that goes back to the long dispute in the East over its canonicity. It is canonical nonetheless, and the Church reads it through St Andrew of Caesarea, whose sixth-century commentary settled its interpretation for the Greek tradition. Orthodox reading is symbolic and refuses millennialism, the expectation of a thousand-year earthly kingdom.