The Deportation of Juan: Migration Rhetoric as Decolonial Strategy in Revelation

Abstract

This article explores John’s Exodus rhetoric as a decolonial strategy and maps its implications for contemporary migrants. Other scholars have convincingly argued that local authorities deported John to Patmos as a vagus, because his message opposed civic institutions, but they do not explain the nature and function of his preaching. Using migrant narratives and decolonial theory, I read John’s call to come out of Babylon and his deployment of Exodus topoi as migration rhetoric. He uses topoi of liberation, wilderness wanderings, and promised land to subvert the colonial situation of the assemblies under Rome. Rather than migrating to a place, believers embody the eschatological Exodus by rejecting food offered to idols and upholding the boundaries of Jewish identity as they wait for the full realization of God’s kingdom in the New Jerusalem. Regarding Latinx migrant communities, John’s Exodus rhetoric informs how migrants legitimate their migration and how they negotiate identity and resist imperialism in the US/Mexico borderlands.

From Imperial Persecution to Colonial Situation: Alternatives to Persecution Theories in Revelation Studies

“…Specifically, it argues that the assemblies turned the debate over idol food into a locus for negotiating power, identity, and wealth. Such exigency framed John’s deployment of Exodus rhetoric—its topoi of Liberation, Wilderness Wanderings, and Promised Land—as a decolonial strategy (Mata 2021: 656). Reading Revelation's social setting as a colonial situation effectively dislodges the depoliticizing trend, and the paradigms undergirding it, pointing to new currents in Revelation studies.…”

“…To subvert the colonial situation under Rome and nullify the threat of idol food in the assemblies, John draws from the eschatological Exodus tradition (Bauckham 1993: 70) to reinforce the continuity between the assemblies and ancient Israel, a clear act of “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011: 45). Specifically, he deploys what I call Exodus Rhetoric—and its topoi of Liberation, Wilderness Wanderings, and Promised Land (Mata 2021: 565) to counteract the idolatrous worship of the Beast and submission to its socio-economic and political power (13:11-18). For John, the Lamb is the only one worthy of worship, for he ransomed believers from the Diaspora through its blood (5:9).…”

“…But John is no postcolonial hero. Realizing that John’s stance entailed the certainty of martyrdom (2:10; 13; 6:9-11; 12:17; 17:6), other believers used idol food to problematize his fixed notions of Jewishness (Mata 2021: 662). By mapping how the assemblies negotiated power, identity and wealth in the colonial situation of Asia Minor, my proposal obviates the need for imperial persecutions, depoliticizing alternatives, or attempts to fit revelation within a particular historical situation to make sense of its inscribed violence.…”