Understanding the book of Revelation means understanding its imagery. This puzzling book contains a fascinating world of pictures and images ' every chapter and every page of it is filled with different kinds of images coming from different traditions and developing different sorts of meaning. The search for the origins of the seer's imagery, its cultural, social-historical, and religious meaning, the problem of Johannine rhetoric, and reader responses to the text are important tasks that merit further discussion. The contributions of this collection explore different aspects of this intriguing field by discussing selected issues of the wide range of materials. The contributors different methodological approaches and apply different tools adopted from a variety of disciplines, such as narrative criticism, intertextuality, social/historical criticism, history of religious comparison, gender studies. The book contains contributions by David Barr, Johannes Beutler, Marco Frenschkowski, Steven Friesen, Laszlo Attila Hubbes, Konrad Huber, Michael Labahn, Kirsi Siitonen, Rebecca Skaggs / Thomas Doyle, Hanna Stenstrom and Robyn J. Whitaker.
Most of the articles were presented and discussed at the seminar Early Christianity between Judaism and Hellenism at the international meeting of the SBL/EABS in Vienna, Austria, 2007. This collection of essays brings new impulses and new methodological and hermeneutical approaches into the discussion on how to understand the imagery in Revelation.