Temporal Dimensions of the Apocalypse: Ancient Christian Reception and Contemporary Hermeneutical Reflections

Bohdan Kuryliak examines the book of Revelation through four interpretive approaches: preterism, idealism, historicism, and futurism. Drawing on a synthesis of close biblical exegesis and early Christian reception history (second to seventh centuries), he analyzes key temporal markers and disputed passages, ranging from the vision of the seals to the millennium. The author challenges the tendency to confine the text's symbolic richness to a single framework, showing that early Christian interpreters often blended these perspectives by combining past, present, and future dimensions. By grounding this synthesis in the text itself, he proposes historicism as an integrative model that incorporates the temporal insights of the other three approaches. The author thus offers a renewed hermeneutical pathway for navigating Revelation's complex temporal landscape.