I'm actually pretty far in Pagels' book. Pretty interesting stuff. She hasn't dove much into the text as much as she's looked at the politics of the time and the various viewpoints in the early church. Revelation is such a crazy book. I've never understood how Xian theologians could speak so authoritatively on it acting as if it was clear as day when many of their eschatological principles are less than a hundred years old. Revelation sounds like Jewish apocalypse literature... So much so that I wonder if perhaps it originally was not an Xian work. Read Rev. 12:1-9. Does it not sound as if the writer did not believe Mashiach had come?