What am I reading?

Understanding what type of literature a book is avoids a lot of misunderstandings.

Here’s a simple example: when Paul says that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, that’s a non-negotiable truth for a Christian. But when Jesus himself says there was a man traveling from Damascus to Jerusalem, that story doesn’t need to have literally happened to be true — because Jesus told us beforehand that he was telling a parable. Same category, “something Jesus said,” but two very different claims to truth, because the genre is different.

Revelation doesn’t give us a simple answer either, because the book is actually composed of three genres at once:

• a letter — whatever is written must have been applicable to the first readers, which includes the material in chapters 4–20, not just 1–3
• a prophecy — whose purpose isn’t to predict the future but to provoke a change that prevents the announced future, as in the story of Jonah
• an apocalypse — not what most people assume that word means, but a genre of provocative resistance literature

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