End Of Days

It is perplexing to me that those who view the various prophetic texts of the Bible (or those which are claimed to be prophetic that is) assume that the texts were written for some future audience. A more natural reading of the Revelation of John of Patmos in my eyes is one which assumes that the narrator of that work was writing for an audience in close proximity to his own time. That is one concerned with the Christian state of affairs in the Roman Empire. For example, and here I won't go into too much detail, there is plenty of scholarship which rather persuasively argues that the famous numbers 666 (or 616 depending on the version of the text one looks at) in fact refer to Nero and that presumably the fear was that he would come back from the world of the dead to persecute Christians once more.