Thanks for your comments. Please give me more.
I am developing a Study that focuses on the history of Judaeo/Christian soteriology, and my material on Revelation is part of that focus.
To date, the Study has grown and the ongoing Draft is available at:
http://www.jwstudies.com/Revolutions_in_Salvation__Draft_.pdf
I update it each time I complete a Draft chapter.
Right now, I am developing material on the various soteriologies of the early Israelites. In other words I am exploring their polytheistic foundation and the late emergence of monotheism by a literate minority.
It is my hope that people will read the books I quote. There is a vast amount of material and I touch on only a sample indicative amount. My hope is that people will be inspired to dig and to dig deeply.
If we are to understand Revelation, as with any other Biblical document, we have to read it as if we were living at the time a document was produced. None of them was writing to us. In every instance, the writer was completely focused on his immediate community, with the intention to influence them. None of them was writing to any later community. They were not writing to us.
In Revelation, John was telling the followers of Jesus that they had to "overcome" and he portrayed their opponents -- Rome on earth and Satan in the heavenly realm -- in various guises, using dramatic symbols that had meaning to his immediate ekklesias (not "churches").
The other canonised purely apocalyptic writing is Daniel, and it too employs mythical beasts. The key there is that the Book of Daniel was written 400 years after the events being portrayed. The 2nd century BCE writers of Daniel were giving coded messages to their own Jewish community while they were being persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes. The authors used the beasts to symbolize the past and also their contemporary tormentors. That would have gone unnoticed by the Jews' oppressors.
Even though Mathew 24 was written as a prophecy, it was created 15 years after Jerusalem had been destroyed. We must not try to impress our 21st century Western thinking on to them. Their "histories" are not literal. Their histories were written purely for religious purposes.
I understand that the communities at the time that Revelation was written were not using the term "Christians". That term did not come into commonplace use until more than 100 years later. There were "Jews" (including Paul, Jesus, John, etc) and there were "Gentiles". Indeed, the writer of Revelation is obviously a Jew through and through. His imagery, his language, is completely full of Jewish idioms and scriptures. Nothing about the life and times of Jesus.
I have not thought through what John meant by "Lord's Day". My gut feel is that he was talking about the divine intervention, which would be manifested by Jesus "coming soon" and the descent of the New Jerusalem. Those first century followers of Jesus expected these events were imminent. Imagine their heightened speculation.
Long after Paul had died someone had to cool their ardour, writing what we now know as 2 Thessalonians. Almost 100 years later, it became clear that their expectations were not being met, so someone wrote those word in 2 Peter to soften the blow.
Let me make my own position very clear: I am writing a history. I am not saying that I believe any of it or whether I agree with anything that any of them said. I am an objective documenter. I am not trying to prove, attack, or defend.
Doug
