Revelation 17 is one of the most difficult parts of the Bible to interpret, particularly verses 7-11. When I was teaching at Andrews University, therefore, I decided to make Revelation 17:7-11 the topic of a PhD seminar class. Five PhD students signed up for the class. For the first fifteen hours of class time, I offered guidance from my experience in handling difficult Bible texts, and a basic overview of Revelation 15-18. I also led the students through the Greek of Revelation 17, word by word and sentence by sentence. The five doctoral students then selected topics related to portions of Revelation 17:7-11, after which they researched and wrote 40-60 page papers on their respective portions of the passage. Each student then took a three-hour segment of the class to share their paper and lead out in the discussion on that topic. The last class session we debriefed on what we had all learned from our intensive engagement with the passage. We all concluded that we were less certain about the meaning of Revelation 17:7-11 than we had been when the class began.

I take some implications from that experience: 1) My definition of a “problem text” is one where it is ten times easier to shoot down someone else’s interpretation of the passage than to create a compelling one yourself. 2) The more time you spend on Revelation 17 the more challenges you see in the text. 3) If the result of group study on a passage results in a total lack of consensus on the meaning of the chapter, that group has probably done their work well.

But let’s not linger on that negative note. I thought it might be helpful to point to several things in this chapter that can be stated with some confidence. Hence the title: What I Think I Know About Revelation 17. I share this as a culmination of more than 40 years of specialized study.