If any book of the Bible has become a minefield of old biblicist assumptions for me, its Revelation.

Once I started moving away from how I had traditionally heard John’s Apocalypse taught and preached, for a long time I simply avoided it altogether.

When I would try to read those familiar passages, I would end up spending as much time wrestling with my own interpretive baggage as I did wrestling with the text itself, and so, exhausted, I would set the book aside and move on to something else.

Over the weekend I picked up Wright’s Kingdom New Testament translation, which incidentally I have been quite impressed with, and when I got back from the bookstore I decided I would give Revelation another go using the KNT.

I’m glad I did. It turns out that reading Revelation in an unfamiliar translation is incredibly helpful for me. The differences in the structure, the cadence, and the word choice all make the text alien enough that I can read it with fresh eyes, and set aside a lot of my baggage.

It makes me wonder though. In the church (and the University) we spend so much time trying to make our congregations familiar with the text. And that’s good, but is a lack of familiarity always the problem? Could it be that sometimes shattering the comfortable familiarity of the text is exactly what we need?