Hi!

I'm John Green.

Welcome to Crash Course Religions.

So the poet Robert Frost, when pondering the end of the world, wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire.

I hold with those who favor fire.” Setting aside the irony of a  man named Frost favoring fire,  his now famous poem envisions the world ending in one of two ways – burning up or freezing solid.

And he certainly wasn’t the first, or last, to pen a vision of doomsday.

In fact many religions have their own version of the end of the world – sometimes multiple versions.

And, yeah, some end in fire, some in ice, and some in a giant battle royale between gods and monsters… with lackluster reviews.

All of this results from a  very strange fact about humans,  which is that we are the only species, at least so far as we know, that knows that the world is going to end.

Like, I know that I am temporary as an individual, but I also know that, like, this is temporary, like, the-sun-is-going-to-boil-the-oceans  temporary.

Anyway, since the world hasn’t ended –yet, there’s still a lot we can learn about ourselves from stories of its potential doom.

[THEME MUSIC] When I hear the word “apocalypse”, I tend to think about the “end of the world.” But in the original Greek, it just meant “revelation” or “unveiling”.

For scholars of religion, an apocalypse is a story where a divine being – like an angel – reveals the fate of the world, usually to a prophet.

And we find these “unveilings” across time and religious traditions, from Kali Yuga in Hinduism to Ragnarök in Norse mythology.

Like, throughout history, oppressed people especially have developed apocalyptic literature to both explain that oppression and imagine, and predict, the end of it.

For instance, around 250 BCE, Jewish people living in the Middle East were living under the rule of the Seleucid Empire.

It was a bleak time, one they believed was the direct result of evil forces in the world.

But hey, there was good news: Some folks claimed those evil forces would soon be destroyed by God, who would then establish his kingdom on Earth.

This ideology was called apocalypticism, and gained steam as Jewish people rose up against their Seleucid rulers.

And these stories weren’t always subtle.

Like, consider The Book of  Daniel from the Hebrew Bible,  an apocalyptic tale written in about 160 BCE.

In it, Daniel speaks of a great beast that rose up out of the sea.

It had a bunch of horns… one of which had “eyes and a  mouth that spoke arrogantly,” and it made war against God’s people.

Now that sounds terrifying and also super weird… until you realize he was perhaps referring to the Greek empire and its king.

Which, to be fair, was only slightly less scary than the beast with all the horns.

Now, unless you happen to be a Biblical scholar, this metaphor would probably be lost on you today, but would have likely resonated very deeply with Jewish people at the time.

And a few generations later,  a group of Jewish people  in Roman-occupied Jerusalem  witnessed the execution of perhaps the most famous apocalyptic prophet, Jesus of Nazareth – who they believed would one day return to usher in a new era on Earth.

Which may sound familiar to those of you who've heard anything about Christianity.

These apocalyptic stories often emerge when people believe they’re facing an insurmountable enemy.

And those stories aren’t  relegated to the ancient past  —many are also being told today.

Just look at QAnon.

Experts say this loose group  of believers may be best  described as an apocalyptic  new religious movement.

Its followers interpret clues about what they believe is a future day of reckoning for a powerful network of corrupt US and global elites.

And in some ways, the global  elites of these conspiracies  are no different from that “great beast” arising from the ocean in the book of Daniel.

So, apocalypses “unveil” the future, but they also have a lot to say about the issues relevant to the people who shaped them.

Which makes sense, of course: if you were trying to predict  what would end the world,  you’d probably pick the scariest  problems you could think of – which are generally the ones  you’re dealing with right then.

Like in March of 2024, I experienced  a minor personal apocalypse  when Jurgen Klopp retired as  manager of Liverpool Football Club.

Stan, meanwhile, suffered a  similar Jurgen-related apocalypse  when Jurgen from the Great  British Bake-Off was eliminated.

I’m sorry for your loss.

And Jeurgen’s.

Anyway, we can find a great example of this in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

In the story, 666 is referred  to as the “number of the beast”.

Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking the beast being referred to is Satan.

Huh, I was expecting a call  from the Devil’s Advocate there.

[DEVIL’S ADVOCATE] Gary.

Listen, man, I already told you I'm not doing another episode unless you get me more screen time.

Also, we got to talk about my rider, bro.

Your green room is trash.

Your Diet Dr. Pepper is warm.

You got these off-brand fruit gummies.

I mean, I'm from hell, man, we invented these things.

It's unacceptable.

God, even warm Diet Dr. Pepper is good, though.

[JOHN] He must be busy.

Right, so, the beast, in this case, is actually a specific person – it’s right there in the text: “Let the person who has insight calculate  the number of the beast, for  it is the number of a man.” Now, some historians argue that the man in question was Nero, a Roman emperor who persecuted early Christians just a couple decades before Revelation was written.

See, unlike English, which uses letters for words, and numerals for numbers, Ancient Hebrew used letters for both.

The first letter, alpha, was one; the second letter, beta, was two, and so on.

And the practice of adding the numerical value of letters together to express a word, known as gematria, was common among Hebrew- and Greek-language writers of the time.

And if we did that with the  modern English alphabet,  my first name would be  10-15-8-14, or added up, 47.

“47 Green.” Has a nice ring to it, actually.

So, with that in mind, if you  take the words “Caesar Nero”  in Greek and spell them  phonetically using Hebrew letters, then add the value of those letters, you guessed it, it comes out to 666.

So just like the Jewish apocalypses before it, the Book of Revelation was responding to the concerns of the people writing it: in this case, the Roman  oppression of early Christians.

The point is, apocalyptic stories often tackle the very real and very current fears of the people that they speak to.

For another great example of this,  let’s head to the Thought Bubble...

The crowing of three roosters.

Several bad winters.

A complete moral unraveling.

And a battle between the gods and their enemies  that would burn the world  and plunge it into the sea.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök,  or “fate of the gods”,  describes signs like these  foreshadowing the end times.

According to myth, after the  entire universe was destroyed,  the world would rise out of the water, some gods would return, and in some versions of the story, two remaining humans would repopulate everything.

But Ragnarök wasn’t just a  prophecy of future destruction:  experts believe the story, in  which the old gods are destroyed, addressed fears about the shift away from the Norse pagan traditions to Christianity, something that was actively  occurring in Iceland at the time.

And the whole “world burning” thing?

Well, Iceland had just experienced the largest volcanic eruption of its kind in millennia, which covered part of the island in lava and  may have affected the  weather as far away as China.

So the end times felt very… timely.

Thanks Thought Bubble!

Just like today’s doomsayers  warning about apocalypses  from AI, climate change,  or Jurgen-based disasters, ancient Icelanders based their predictions for the future on the concerns of their present.

And apocalyptic stories can  also be applied to new problems,  centuries after they were first written.

I mean, people have certainly done that with the Book of Revelation, and Ragnarök.

Just like some Hindus believe that we’re currently  experiencing the Kali Yuga,  or “age of darkness”.

According to Hindu cosmology,  Kali Yuga is the last great  epoch before the universe  undergoes destruction and rebirth.

It’s marked by disorder, disease, and injustice,  including things like political  corruption and pollution.

And today, some people in southern India see those as directly contributing to rising cancer rates.

Hindu texts may not specifically mention cancer as a sign of the Kali Yuga, but Hindus are able to apply those old stories to their current concerns.

This is also true with the Mahdi,  a messiah figure especially  prominent in Shi’a Islam.

Some believe the Mahdi will return to Earth before the Last Judgment to guide people toward a just Islamic world.

Others believe the Mahdi is already on Earth.

And various people have claimed to be the Mahdi over the centuries, usually amid popular resistance to political and economic inequality.

I have a friend who is Shia and belongs to a group that believes the Mahdi is already alive on Earth.

And my friend told me that the Mahdi showed up when you really needed him to change his tire.

Like that's proper retail politics.

That's my kind of apocalyptic leader, the kind who will show up when I need him.

Which brings us to an interesting segue.

Because, while it’s useful to look at these apocalyptic stories as just that – stories — many people have and do develop deep spiritual belief in an apocalypse.

And, since the world still turns (at least while we’re filming this), that leaves a lot of “end of the  world” prophecies unfulfilled.

As my religion professor Dr. Rogan once put it, “Never predict the end of the world.

You’ll either be wrong, or else no one will be around to congratulate you.” So, what happens when  someone’s sincerely held belief  doesn’t pan out the way they were told it would?

Well, according to the sociologist Lorne Dawson, people have a few options.

Believers might just decide  that the prophecy had come true,  but in a spiritual realm, not a physical one.

That’s what the Jehovah’s  Witnesses did back in the 1800s, when they predicted that Jesus was gathering his  true believers, who would soon  be transformed into spirits.

When no one transformed,  leaders still claimed success,  saying that although no one  had vanished into thin air, believers who died a natural death would now be transformed immediately into spirits.

But then came a second prediction.

This time, it said the world would end in 1975.

Some Jehovah’s Witnesses took this new apocalypse  so seriously that they sold  their homes and belongings and focused on recruiting more  followers before the end times.

And when that prophecy failed to materialize,  the church used two other  approaches from Dawson’s list.

Some leaders claimed the prophecy  was never going to happen,  but it was a test of faith, to  separate the true believers.

While others said that individual members had taken their prophecy too literally, and that 1975 was a miscalculation.

There’s also a fourth option for believers of failed prophecies: blame others.

For instance, beginning in 2017, a core QAnon prophecy, known as The Storm, stated that then-President Donald Trump was working to bring down the, quote, “deep state,” whose leaders would soon be arrested en masse and sent to Guantanamo Bay.

As Trump’s term of office came to an end without unleashing said storm, some QAnon followers began to say that the group itself was a media hoax, and had never even existed.

Which is weird because they made a lot of merch.

It would be like me saying that Nerdfighteria  never existed, even after  all the Pizza John designs.

So will the world end in fire?

As it turns out, apocalypse stories do more than predict the future: they reveal the worries of the present.

And when end-of-the-world predictions fail, followers can get creative to rework the story.

After all, the next line from  Frost’s poem does exactly that: “But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate.

To say that for destruction ice.

Is also great.

And would suffice.” Turns out that apocalypses, like poems,  are flexible, evolving,  and open to interpretation.

In our next episode, we’ll ask the questions “What is religious freedom?” and “Is it even truly possible?”