with due respect this dog's breakfast of an article deserves a pov rampage and a much more exhaustive one than the minor changes made on december please look over some of the undocumented irrelevant and in some cases just plain weird interpretations of revelation that were removed or edited and suggest which edits should be undone the article as a whole is unnecessarily repetitive and only a small fraction of it represents the views of modern scholarship see my comments above under talk section everyone's view on thomas jefferson myth america i sympathise with your concern to ' provide a useful contrast to the other interpretations in the article' which generally reflect conservative christian in fighting about the meaning of the book but tell us very little about revelation itself i'm not convinced however that to dismiss the work as the incoherent ravings of an early christian heretic cerinthus is the best way to do this a number of scholars have demonstrated that the book follows a clearly marked concentric structure which evidences balanced literary construction while it has long been acknowledged that revelation parodies and inverts the imagery of first century roman imperialism and the emperor cult in particular to make it's point see eg steven j friesen's recent work in this area imperial cults and the apocalypse of john this hardly supports jefferson's view that the work is a meaningless rant but nor does it support the highly subjective perspectives of historicism and futurism which have obviously irritated you a balanced well documented historical critical introduction to the work should in my opinion make up the bulk of this article with other conservative christian approaches acknowledged separately in brief concise fashion i am quite happy for the jefferson reference to remain for its whimsical value and tentatively suggest that it could be accompanied by some of the numerous historical warnings by prominent christian leaders and commentators about the danger of misusing the book i also note that the reference to mithraic parallels has been re inserted in the authorship section what this has to do with the question of authorship i have no idea the parallel itself is completely unconvincing and the book from which it is taken is a typical example of an author falling in love with his subject and unnecessarily exaggerating its importance while i don't deny that the work by payam nabarz represents a good layman's guide to mithraism the suggested parallel between this quote and revelation on page see google books for the text hardly warrants the preface that the two are 'almost identical' or the overly enthusiastic observation that 'the similarity of spirit is abundant to the extent that the names of jesus and mithras could be interchangeable' these are not the remarks of a careful exegete it is quite likely that there are echoes of mithraism the religion of the roman army in revelation which freely reuses both jewish and greco roman mythology in polemical fashion but this is not one of them would anyone object to a re removal of this paragraph this article deserves a pov rampage all i can say to that is read this wp npov why not be inclusionist instead of deleting chunks of information you don't personally agree with an encylopedia is supposed to present all legitimate views not stick with just one the most popular whatsmore thomas jefferson's opinion isn't just whimsical it's representative of many historical figures views talk