I decided to
go ahead and fact-check Preston’s claims about his credentials on his About
page on his website, where it states: “Preston’s book Who Is This Babylon, has
been positively peer reviewed, and received a positive review in the official publication
of the Russian Academy of Science”[1]
(we will abbreviate it as RAS for brevity’s sake).
Being I do love to give Preston hell for his
pseudo-scholarship, I went to RAS’ website and found absolutely nothing about
Don K Preston on there in their databases. I figured, it being Don, he likely
made it all up because that is the kind of person he has been known to be.
When asked though and grilled on it, as to where William and
I could find this positive peer review in the OFFICIAL PUBLICATION, my response
was, as is usual and is common, mostly incendiary remarks from Don K Preston,
so I assumed the bloke was lying his tail off about this and just trying to do
a cover-up as usual when he’s been caught in a lie, but lo and behold, after a
week of not budging and the help of my associate William Vincent, we managed to
get one random mention from Preston about a person named Basil Lourie and
Christian East. As we expected, we did not find any mention of a Basil Lourie
nor Christian East on the website either, nor to be on the database. However,
we did come to find this bishop on the internet and also did eventually find
this man’s book where he references Preston and a review he did on Preston’s
Who Is This Babylon.
No thanks to Preston, we managed to get information from
Bishop Basil Lourie himself and he even was kind enough to send me the link to
his book in English and later the references in the book regarding Preston’s
“review”.
This book by
Orthodox bishop Basil Lourie – aka Heiromonk Gregori, is called “The
Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, & to whom? Studies on the Rise of
Islam & Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough”. In it Lourie footnotes Don K Preston
at one point in his chapter titled, “Friday
Veneration In 6th & 7th Ce. Christianity &
Christian Legends about the Conversion of Nagran”. The footnote reads: “Cf.,
on this tradition in the Apocalypse of John in NT, Beagley, A. J. The “Sitz im
Leben” of the Apocalypse with Particular Reference to the Role of the Church’s
Enemies. Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die
Kunde der älteren Kirche, 50. Berlin/New York, 1987. The matter remains
controversial but I am inclined to agree with this identification; cf. B.
Lurie., [Rev. of:] Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon? (Ardmore, 1999).
Christian East. 2 (8) (2000): 497–99 (in Russian)”.
I was pretty
convinced Preston had probably made it up, given all the hate-filled vitriol,
asinine comments, and incendiary remarks he gave in return, but as it turns
out, the reference to the review is in fact written in a publication in 2001
called “Christian East 2nd Series Dedicated To The Study of
Christian Culture of the Asian Peoples and Africa. New Series Edition Volume 2
of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Hermitage Museum Aleteya
Publishing House. San-Petersburg, Moscow. 2001.”
Not sure
where or why it is not in the databases as communism fell in 1991 but upon
studying it a bit, it may very well be that in 2013-2018, RAS by Putin’s
orders, decided to undergo some large reforms to basically upgrade and update
so they could be better for the pursuit of academia. This may have led to many
publications simply being wiped out perhaps but regardless, I was wrong. This
publication does exist (or did – I am unaware if it still produces anything or
not).
Now, was this
publication of RAS actually kind to Preston’s Who Is This Babylon? And did it
really receive “a positive review”?
Well, I’ll
let you the reader decide on this but the way that it reads to me after
translating Russian, French, and German into English (which was quite a labor),
is that Lourie agrees with his conclusions that Babylon is likely identified as
Jerusalem… however, it doesn’t seem that this review is “positive” about the
book as he claims there to be “almost no
chance of attention from the scholarly community” and “we have not come close to any evidential identifications of his Sitz
im Leben”.
Lourie does
list some wordings about the strengths of Preston’s book but also says in his
footnote that “more often than not, we
encounter such an identification without any proof” (reference is to
Preston) and that “it should be noted
that although early dating seems more appropriate "to identify Babylon
with Jerusalem (and so also follows Preston), however, such identification is
theoretically possible at the end of the 1st century.]. It doesn’t read as
an endorsement in my opinion. He clearly says that Preston often gives an
identification without any proof, though it is theoretically possible for
Revelation to be written before 70. This basically is just a review saying he
doesn’t have proof but it is theoretical and plausible it was written pre-70
and because of that possibility, we should not completely dismiss minority
views like Preston’s just because of a consensus, which I would wholeheartedly
agree with. We should not dismiss minority position views just for the heck of it. We should be willing
to examine the viewpoint and challenge it to see if it found wanting or not. This
was the review referenced: I have translated it from Russian to the best of my
ability. I may be asking a friend soon to translate it who knows Russian much
better than I and can make it read more fluidly than I. Footnote with this
review is listed below [bold].
Review: The next book about the
Apocalypse of John, which came out of the pen of an American pastor, has almost
no chance of attention from the scholarly[2]
community - and this is very unfortunate for the scholarly community itself in
the first place. Of course, the book is concentrated around theological issues
that the scholarly community does not care about, but at the same time,
regardless of these issues, the author again poses the old and still unsolved
problem of the science of the Apocalypse - the identification of Babylon. The
scholarly community can only boast here of its own “consensus” (Babylon of the
Apocalypse and other early Christian works = Rome), which is by no means
equivalent to proof. The author of this book, like only a small number of
previous scholars, insists on another identification: Babylon = Jerusalem. All
new and new private issues of the history of the text of the Apocalypse are
being resolved - but we have not come close to any evidential identifications
of his Sitz im Leben. Even the two closest literary analogues of the Apocalypse
of John - the Apocalypse of Ezra (4 Ez.) and the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch (2
Bar.) - the scholarly consensus refers to a completely different environment: not
Christian, but Judean. So far, the study of all three of these apocalypses are
reduced to the accumulation of "trifles" - such as, for example, well
identifiable elements of liturgical sequences or citations of more ancient
apocalyptic literature - and all the "conclusions and
generalizations" are no more than initial attempts to link these
observations together. Of these attempts, the most competitive should be,
apparently, those that as little as possible resort to a “spiritual” (that is, alas,
subjective) interpretation of the source. That is the strength and concept of
the book under review. We will name only a few examples: the Apoc. verse. 11,
8, identifying Babylon with the city where “the Lord was crucified” (p. 31),
parallelism between Apoc. 17 (God's punishment for the Harlot - Babylon) and
Ezek. 16 (the same, but concerning the harlot - Jerusalem) (p. 60 - 61), verse
Apoc. 18, 4 (see above, note 1), also noted by R. H. Charles' of parallelism
between Matt. 24 (disasters raging on Israel) and Apoc. 6 (p. 1 - 3). So, while
we are in the zone of “cumulative” evidence, scholarship has no right to forget
any “Minority Opinions”, and even less - those of those opinions that are much
less “force” texts than scholarly “consensus”[3].
The author of these lines also has a special reason to pay attention to the
possibility of identifying Babylon as Jerusalem: just such a conclusion would
be very natural, if we consider that Christianity does not go back to the
Jewish tradition that had power over the Jerusalem Temple, some other
“Judaism,” whose relationship with the Temple was not particularly simple. In
this case, the similarity of all three of the above apocalypses could be
explained by their common background of the pre-Christian era.
In conclusion,
it does exist but it really seems a stretch to call this a “positive” review
when it is clearly filled with some very damning critiques like that anything is
possible theoretically but ultimately Preston offers identification of Babylon without
proof other than subjective spiritual interpretation.
[2] Note that I, Conley, have translated the word ученый as “scholarly” in this
translation instead of "science" because the context in Russian doesn’t seem to make one iota of
sense for anything scientific. One should note though ученый as far as I know usually does mean science or scientific vs scholarly as it has to deal with researching and academia in a general sense. Maybe it should be translated as science or scientific but if so, it leaves a huge question over what "science" is involved here, as there seems to be none.
[3] More
often than not, we encounter such an identification without any proof. To
illustrate the shaky ground we find ourselves here if we just want to move on
to the evidence, I will quote one of the most authoritative modern commentaries
(on Apoc. 18:4 - Get out of her (Babylon)...) : “It does not seem that the most
literary sense is possible: an invitation from the city of Rome!” (here the
author without proof accepts the “consensus”: Babylon - Rome) Imagining an
allusion to the flight from the Pella in 70 (i.e. Babylon = Jerusalem) supposes
the use of an old document which cannot be isolated without support (here
another consensus comes into effect on another controversial issue: the date
before 70 according to R. H. Charles is considered unacceptable for the
Apocalypse itself; it should be noted that although early dating seems more
appropriate "to identify Babylon with Jerusalem (and so also follows
Preston), however, such identification is theoretically possible at the end of
the 1st century.]. So there remains the spiritual meaning: it is indeed the
pagan context and idolatry, of which the capital of the empire is the perfect
example, that Christians are invited to leave (Pierre Prigent, L'Apocalypse de
Saint Jean. Lausanne - Paris, 1981 - Commentary on the New Testament, XIV,
268). The whole scholarly consensus on the identification of “Babylon” is built
on this kind of “spiritual” interpretation! For a more complete review of the
history of theography that accepts the identification of Babylon - Jerusalem,
see in the dissertation (the author of which adheres to the same point of
view): A.J. Beagley, The “Sitz im Leben” of the Apocalypse with Particular
Reference to the Role of the Church's Enemies (Berlin - New York, 1987. Supplement
to the magazine for New Testament science and the news of the older church,
50). For pointing me to this work, I thank Dr. Ph. L. Mayo.
