If John had regarded them as
purely heavenly guardians of the churches as (i) suggests, he would not have
been able to attribute to them the sins and failures of their people.
Furthermore, he could not have addressed and transmitted letters with quill and
ink to purely heavenly figures. The common apocalyptic concept of an
individual angel as a corporate symbol of a nation or people (Dan. 10,10-21;
12,1) has thus been combined with a human representative, as is suggested by
the equation of the seven angels with the seven stars (Apoc. 1,16 cf. 1,20),
where the former are clearly the earthly counterparts of their latter, heavenly
images.
It should be emphasized,
moreover, that such an interpretation does not require the support of the
variant reading: την γυναικα σου 'Ιαζαβελin Apoc. 2,20 so that it becomes a
reference to the angel- bishop's wife. Textually the variant is uncertain and,
in terms of my understanding of apocalyptic imagery, "Jezebel" is the
Old Testament reference which locates she who acts in her spirit in the
writer's time in the events of salvation history. Such a reading would
therefore falsify my interpretation rather than confirm it by making
"Jezebel" an actual person rather than the apocalyptic image. Hemer
was far too quick in concluding, therefore, that the role of the angel as
standing for an individual, corporate representative was somehow falsified by
the falseness of such a variant reading. (Allen Brent, Cultural Episcopacy and
Ecumenism: Representative Ministry in Church History from the Ages of Ignatius
of Antioch to the Reformation [Studies in Christian Mission; Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1992], 107-8)
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