By Dr. Robert Sungenis · 2007
The Apocalypse tends to be read either as a code for tomorrow's headlines or not at all. Volume II of the Catholic Apologetics Study Bible takes a third route across 550 pages, opening with an introduction on how the book works before saying what it means: why it behaves like a dream and like poetry, why it conceals, what the Tradition of the Church supplies, and when it was written. Sungenis then reads it as seven dramas rather than one timeline, and an outline, charts and diagrams keep that structure in view through the verse-by-verse commentary.
Symbols, numbers and characters are each accounted for: the seven letters, the four horsemen, the 144,000, the two witnesses, the woman clothed with the sun, the seven heads, the mark and the number 666, the thousand years, the new Jerusalem. The Greek, Hebrew and Latin are worked through, and the Fathers, medievals, popes, councils, saints and the Catechism are cited throughout. The prophecies of Daniel and Zechariah get separate expositions, the competing readings of the millennium are set out and answered, and the text is correlated at points with Fatima and other Marian apparitions. The biblical text is the 1966 Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.