Monday, October 9, 2023

Nicolas Colladon (1530-1586) on the “Woman” in Revelation 12

   

Colladon sees Apc 12 as fulfilling the function of an interlude between the various visions of disaster. However, he stresses that the events depicted there are not to be seen as coming sequentially after Apc 11 (the two witnesses) but simply as a clearer description of what has already been said elsewhere in the book, (Methodos, 1584, 255) especially as regards the celestial orientation of the true church and its struggles with the satanic powers. Apc 12 is thus, in his view, a recapitulation of ideas and images scattered throughout the first eleven chapters.

 

Like Meyer, du Pinet, and most other commentators, Colladon takes the woman to symbolize not the Virgin Mary, but the Church. . . . he thus makes a point of saying that the woman’s flight into the desert in verse 13 is no more than a repetition and an elaboration of the same flight described in verse 6, and he notes that as Satan is supposed to have fallen from heaven, a problem is posed by his appearance there with the woman. Colladon solves the problem by saying that just as the woman (i.e., the church) is on earth and yet looks toward heaven as her true location, so conversely Satan was an angel in heaven before his downfall in verse 7. (Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 77)