Not Afraid of the Antichrist: Why We Don't Believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture

by Michael L. Brown

With good reason, many scholars identify Rome as the Babylon of John’s day. Rome annually celebrated its founding on seven hills or “mountains,” and regularly called itself the city on seven hills (see Revelation 17:9). Of the empires that ruled other kings (see verse 18), it was the one that John’s audience knew best. It was a naval power (at that time the world’s only significant one) that traded in the very imports listed in Revelation 18:12–13. Rome even had an emperor who persecuted Christians, Nero, who had died yet was widely expected to return (cf. Revelation 13:3; 17:10–11). (Coincidence or not, “Nero Caesar” spelled in Hebrew does come out to 666 when calculated as a number in the traditional way.) Most importantly, Rome destroyed the Temple and enslaved God’s people as Babylon had done, so many Jewish people already envisioned Rome as a new Babylon. Indeed, they usually understood Daniel’s fourth human kingdom, a successor of Babylon, as Rome (see Daniel 2:40–43; 7:6, 23).