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by Warren Lewis

Peter, son of John Olivi (ca. 1248-1298), composed his commentary on the Book of Revelation over a lifetime of teaching at Franciscan schools in southern France and in Florence.
He found the Aristotelian categories of interpretation he had studied at the University of
Paris too limited for understanding the Biblical representation of the mystery of evil and the revelation of good in the Apocalypse. He turned, instead, to the interpretation of scripture by Scripture; the thought of Joachim of Fiore, Bonaventure, and Augustine; a solid grasp of history; the perception of groupings of sevens in the Biblical texts; and a device of his own invention, the multiple-literal interpretation of Scripture. He was primed to learn the meaning of the scriptural text from Scripture itself.
These tools enabled Olivi to discover, among other things, the eschatological work of an army of the Lord, “144,000” elect Jews who were to defend the walls of the New Jerusalem against the bloodthirsty forces of the antichrist. These valiant friends of Jesus would come, ready to fight and die, singing songs of Moses in harmony with Christian hymns about the Lamb.
In the same year that Olivi died, the murderous habit of persecution of the Jews resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews throughout Europe. Perhaps if we had read and believed Olivi’s Lectura super Apocalipsim, we could have avoided 700 years of Holocaust.

ISBN: 978-1-57659-4667