What My Project Is All About

Every great city demands a worthy history. This is not less true for the New Jerusalem described at the conclusion of the New Testament book of Revelation, the resplendent ideal city that has inspired countless theological, artistic, and political developments since it was written at the turn to the second century. From Irenaeus to 16th-century English Puritans, from the so-called Montanists to 19th-century liberal, progressive, and communist leaders, from the fourth-century churches of Rome to East Coast hip-hop, the image has shaped, and at times defined, the course of human events and artistic expression throughout the Christian patrimony.

Much of the early stage of this story, however, has never been told. In this project, I will seek to understand some of the earliest and most fundamental conceptions of this vivid figure as shown in their textual and visual reception, and further to situate them and their rise within the historical conditions that brought them forth in the formative centuries of the Christian imperial age. Building on my previous research, which investigates the very earliest reception of the image during the period of virtually universal acceptance of the book of Revelation (i.e. until ca. 312) (see my 2025 Brill monograph, City of Gods: The New Jerusalem of John's Revelation in Early Christianity), this project will illuminate how previously existing theological ideas developed in the larger context of what could be described as imperial Christianity—that is, the late antique political system in which Christianity became a dominant social, cultural, and political factor—from the time of Constantine’s and Licinius’s reforms vis-à-vis Christianity until just after the restoration of the book of Revelation in the Greek East in the sixth century. While I will look to the Greek and Latin textual tradition, I will also investigate both the Syriac textual tradition and the material cultural production—specifically visual art and architecture—in which these three languages were dominant. 

In the end, this project will illuminate the various significances attached to the image of the New Jerusalem, why and how the image came to be so frequently and lastingly employed in literature, visual art, and political thinking during this period, and how these developments grew out of the preceding period and further evolved in the period that followed.

This current project, therefore, by picking up where I and others have left off, promises a substantial, vital, and previously unwritten history of the reception of John’s New Jerusalem during the period of the late-antique Roman empire, broadly construed.

"Revelation’s New Jerusalem in the Age of Imperial Christianity (ca. 313–ca. 600)” / "Das Neue Jerusalem der Apokalypse des Johannes im Zeitalter des imperialen Christentums (ca. 313–ca. 600)”

DFG proj. no. 530173204
Principal Investigator: Nathan Betz

Visit the project's official page and my bio >