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Abram Sachar writes that the Temple of Solomon, built about 1000 BC,

grew until it overshadowed Jerusalem. It became more than an object of worldly greatness. It was a symbol of peace, of social jus-tice. Ethical meanings were read into its blocks and stones; allego-ries were found hidden in its measurements! No iron, it was said, went into the construction of the Temple, for iron is a weapon of war. The Temple site, the rabbis taught, was chosen because on it two brothers had shown for each other a divine, self-sacrificing love.

These and other legends clustered about Solomon’s work of pride until the Temple rivaled Sinai in its religious significance.¹

The Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587  BC, in Newton’s time had become a cult, a science, a dream and the seventeenth-century equivalent of a mega-computer. It was not of earthly design. Just as Moses had received the divine plan of the tabernacle from Jehovah on Mount Sinai, so had David received the divine plan of the Temple from God and passed it on to his son Solomon, assuring him that, “All this . . . the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even in all the works of this pattern”

(1 Chron. 28:19). The Temple of Solomon was the blueprint of God’s mind; it was a mirror held up to the divinely created cosmos. It was,

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in the words of Frank Manuel, “the most important embodiment of a future extra-mundane reality, a blueprint of heaven; to ascertain every last fact about it was one of the highest forms of knowledge, for here was the ultimate truth of God’s kingdom expressed in physical terms.”²

Isaac Newton was fascinated by the Temple all his life. He made an extended effort to work out the exact measurements of the sacred cubit by which it had been built.³ He did not include a history of the Jews in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended but instead filled five pages in the middle of the book with the floor plan, as if that said everything there was to say about God’s chosen people. He and his col-leagues thought that if you could know precisely the measurement of every pillar and every tile and every nook and cranny in God’s sacred temple then you might be able to tease from it the answer to every ques-tion in the universe, for it itself was the full measure of the universe.

In the early Renaissance there began to appear in Europe scale mod-els not only of the Temple of Solomon but of the Temple of Jerusalem and the Tabernacle, for they, too, were mirrors of God’s mind (the Temple of Jerusalem having been built in accordance with the design of the Temple of Solomon but also modified a little later, with details from Ezekiel’s dream of the Temple). Entrepreneurial scholars trundled these models across England, giving lectures for the edification of the masses and for very small sums; in 1726, the mathematician and divine William Whiston had a craftsman build scale models of the Tabernacle of Moses and of “the Temple of Jerusalem, serving to explain Solomon’s, Zorobabe’s, Herod’s, and Ezekiel’s Temples; and had Lectures upon that at London, Bristol, Bath and Tunbridge Wells.”⁴ Much earlier, in February 1675, the celebrated 1:100 models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle of Moses, complete with every last moving and unmoving part and constructed by the famed Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon, were brought from Amsterdam and put on display, every day except Saturdays and Sundays, beside the tree near the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place in London.

Every morning, the local rabbi crossed the lawn from the nearby synagogue and answered questions about this magnificent artifact.

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And on the first day he answered questions from the king and queen of England who had been among the very first to come and visit. Every day thereafter, amidst the barking of dogs and the shrieking of children and the muffled clattering of carriages passing by on the muddy streets, he fielded questions that were usually put by well-dressed dandies and were meant, not to edify the asker, but to entertain the asker’s lady companion, and the rabbi bore up without condescension in the face of these questions which were bitter proof of the ignorance of the gen-tiles in the face of the holiness of Rabbi Jacob Judah and that of Leon’s model of the sacred Temple.

It is very likely that, one chilly February day, Isaac Newton came to examine the scale model of the Temple of Solomon.* He was thirty-three; nobody knew him, or that he was anything else than just another lean and hungry young man; and so nobody would have paid any atten-tion to him as he gazed with a sort of preternatural intensity into bow-els of the scale modbow-els of the Temple of Solomon.

In 1675, Isaac Newton had already begun work on his celebrated exegesis of biblical prophecy, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. And it’s likely that as early as 1675 Newton had reached the startling conclusion, shared by very few of his fellow countrymen, that the entire prophecy of the Book of Revelation—

thundering horsemen, cascading stars, woman clothed in the sun, all of them—unfolded within the Temple of Jerusalem. That is why, scruti-nizing Rabbi Leon’s brilliantly wrought scale model of the Temple of Solomon on that chilly February day, ignoring the poorly informed sal-lies of the foppish young. Newton might well have superimposed, in his mind’s eye, the Temple of Jerusalem on the Temple of Solomon. And if he did so, he very likely saw, scaled-down and Lilliputian-sized like

*Newton visited London just five times before he moved down permanently in 1696.

One of these early visits was in February–March 1675. Of this visit, we know only that Newton attended two meetings of the Royal Society. It’s unimaginable that he would not have been informed by a colleague of the presence of Rabbi Leon’s celebrated scale model, and that he would not have gone to see it—though there is no record of this.

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the Temple, making his way with dignity and forthrightness across the miniaturized floor of the model of the Temple of Solomon-Jerusalem, the tiny but eager figure of John of Patmos.

Isaac Newton’s method of interpreting the Book of Revelation was so intricate, so complex, so revolutionary, that its readers might be forgiven for taking it in slowly, bit by bit—a little here, a little there.

It was based on the assumption that the Temple of Jerusalem was indeed the blueprint of God’s mind; that it was a replica of the universe;

and that therefore John could find within it, however cosmic or outré, every single prophetic hieroglyph or figure that he used in the Book of Revelation.

But these images could not be seen directly. John’s task was to derive from them the physical layout of the temple, its vessels and its paraphernalia and the ceremonies that unfolded within the temple. The original cosmic delineation of the tabernacle had been made by Moses in the desert; seers had made additions ever since; and John himself was a seer who knew more than had ever been written down.

In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes what Moses did, telling us of the traditional symbolism of the Temple of Jerusalem: the three parts of the sanctuary were

every one made in way of imitation and representation of the uni-verse. When Moses distinguished the tabernacle into three parts, and allowed two of them to the priests, as a place accessible and common, he denoted the land and the sea, these being of general access to all; but he set apart the third division for God, because heaven is inaccessible to men. And when he ordered twelve loaves to be set on the table, he denoted the year, as distinguished into so many months. By branching out the candlestick into seventy parts, he secretly intimated the Decani, or seventy divisions of the planets;

and as to the seven lamps upon the candlesticks, they referred to the course of the planets, of which that is the number. The veils,

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too, which were composed of four things, they declared the four elements.⁵

Here is an example of what (or so Newton believed) John does all through the Book of Revelation: passage 10:1 reads: “I saw another mighty angel . . . his face blazed like the sun, his legs like pillars of fire, and he had a little book open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and then shouted with a loud voice like the roar of a lion.” How did John come by this image?

He has seen, in the Temple, a priest place one foot in the brazen laver or “sea of glass”—a large bowl filled with water beside the altar—and the other foot on the ground. In the lexicon of prophetic figures that John knew and that Newton had rediscovered, the earth symbolizing the Greek Empire, and the sea symbolizing the Latin Empire. But these basic images are drawn from the temple, so that the priest with one foot in the laver and the other on the ground becomes, in the visions, an angel with one foot in the sea and one foot on the earth, which, taken altogether, signifies an event that will concern both the Latin and Greek Empires.And, since the high priest of the ceremonies is reading from the Torah (or the Book of Law) this little book becomes the “little book” that the angel shows John.

As Matt Goldish writes, Newton in his Observations,

explains with the aid of his prophetic lexicon how the images pre-sented are in fact representations of the prophet’s experience in the Temple.” [Newton explains] move by move, Saint John’s entrance into the Temple precinct, his viewing of the various ceremonial objects, and his observations of the ceremonies of the daily wor-ship, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles. Every aspect of the Temple—its physical layout, vessels and ceremonies—

thus becomes critical to the unraveling of the secrets held in the Apocalypse. . . .

The scheme of Revelation, in Newton’s conception, is that of

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the prophet viewing events in the physical Temple, but reporting them in a cryptic or allegorical form which was designed to hint at the major events of apocalyptic history. Thus, the vision functions for him at three levels: the concrete physical scene of the prophet walking in the Temple; the cryptic manner in which this activity is described in Revelation; and the prophecy that this cryptic descrip-tion is attempting to convey to those who understand.⁶

But there was such a kinship between the Tabernacle and the two Temples—all three are the warp and woof of the mind of God—all three have operated on some realm of being too mystical to be explained or understood or even imagined but which are the shape of God’s mind—that all three eternally vibrate with the other and if need be John can summon into the Tempe of Jerusalem resonances of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle; the boundaries of all three are blurred. The Temple of Jerusalem bursts its bonds, and events and objects skirting it also become the earthly correlatives of major events in the future his-tory of mankind. For example, sometimes the Tabernacle of Moses with the twelve tribes of Israel encamped around it seem to be superimposed on the Temple of Jerusalem, and the twelve tribes become the root, the anchor point, the essential substance of events in the future history of mankind to which John will give hieroglyphic form 1,500 years later.

What became clear to Newton as he pored over the Book of Revelation was that the brilliant and despairing prophet John, incar-cerated at Patmos, has recreated in his imagination, bit by bit, stone by stone, the entire structure of the Temple of Jerusalem (with the Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon flickering in and out). And within this structure, and from this structure, he has created the entire Book of Revelation.

It makes sense that he should have done this. It’s the measure of how traumatized he was by the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, which was far and away the worst of the many atrocities he knew had been inflicted on the Jews or the Christians, or that he had experienced. He

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was inconsolable in his grief over the Temple of Solomon. But he was a creative genius, and there is a way in which grieving creative geniuses can restore their psychic balance. They can recreate that which they have lost, and in this case John recreated in his mind’s eye the Temple of Jerusalem.

John built a temple in his mind—and, lo and behold, God walked in. Let’s recall that not in any synagogue, but only in the Holy of Holies in the sanctuary of the Temple, could God reside on earth; the destruc-tion of God’s home on earth was the reason many pious Jews grieved so deeply for the loss of the Temple; and, on some lofty level of creative genius, John welcomed God back into that temple in his mind which would become the narrative vehicle of the Book of Revelation.

The Book of Revelation was for Newton an immensely intricate and complex artifact. We’re used to thinking of John’s Apocalypse as hav-ing been composed in a shav-ingle intense burst of inspiration. Newton did not believe this. John of Patmos was a divinely inspired prophet, to be sure. But he was no eye-rolling ecstatic. Rather, he was an artist in the classical mode, wholly in command of his creation—divinely inspired by but not intimidated by God—calm in the presence of the sublime and prophesying, as one seventeenth-century divine wrote, “from the still voice of a great humility, a sound mind, and a heart reconciled to himself and all the world.”⁷

The true prophet wasn’t without passion, but he was coolly scientific—almost like Isaac Newton! John constructed the Book of Revelation carefully, piece by piece, rationally, deliberately, like Praxiteles sculpted parts of the Parthenon in ancient Athens or Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome or Johann Sebastian Bach composed the Mass in B minor in the tranquil-ity of the Collegium Musicum in Leipsig—maybe, perhaps, a little like Isaac Newton composed the Principia Mathematica!

Still, we get the impression when we read the Book of Revelation that it is a “channeled” text; that John didn’t exactly write it, but, rather, that God transmitted it to John through Jesus Christ. As such, it poses

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the same problem as all channeled texts: how is it that something that is ineffable, numinous, not graspable by the senses—something coming from a higher level of reality—can possibly be communicated to the hard as rocks physical time-space continuum in which we live? Les Misérables author Victor Hugo’s spirit guides told him this wasn’t something that could really be done: “There is no alphabet of the uncreated, there is no grammar of heaven. You don’t learn Divine like you learn Hebrew.

. . . Angels are not Professors of Divine Language. . . . All that which is uncreated is unnamed, the speech of celestial language is bedazzlement, to express oneself is to be resplendent, clarity of speech is luminosity.”⁸

James Merrill (1926–95), the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet whose masterpiece The Changing Light at Sandover (1981) is built out of channeled texts, explained that such texts are by nature highly subjective: “The powers they [the spirits] represent are real—as, say, grav-ity, is ‘real’—but they’d be invisible, inconceivable, if they’d never passed through our heads and clothed themselves out of the costume box they’d found there. How they appear depends on us, on the imaginer.”⁹

Isaac Newton reveals yet another unknown facet—that of an expert on channeling—when he describes what he calls the “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions” which is Revelation 5:6–7. This preamble explains the mechanics of John’s prophesying: God gives Christ a scroll with seven seals. Christ, loosening the seals one by one, reads the scroll. The essence of the scroll is transmitted to John—but what Christ reads is not what John writes. Newton writes movingly that the contents of the scroll are “of so transcendent excellency that they were fit to be communicated to none but the Lamb. . . . You are to conceive that the Lamb opened the book for his own perusal only & that the concomitant visions which appeared to Saint John were but general & dark emblems of what was particularly & perspicuously revealed to the Lamb in this book.”¹⁰

The contents of Revelation are merely “certain visions which Saint John saw concomitant to the opening of the seals.”Christ reads, and transmits raw creative energy to John, who, seizing “the motions of some and voices of others”¹¹ from the costume box of the Temple of Jerusalem

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through which the Book of Revelation is unfolding, clothes that energy in Apocalyptic visions.*

But Isaac Newton isn’t interested in explaining channeling.

His concern is to demonstrate that God wrote the “Preamble to the Prophetic Visions” to demonstrate the true nature of the relationship between God and Christ. That true nature is that Christ is not equal, but subordinate, to God. The proof of this? Christ doesn’t know the future history of the world until he reads it in the scroll God has given him. Christ doesn’t already possess the knowledge of the future history of mankind that God possesses; he is not equal to God.

The God we meet in Revelation is the God of Arius and Newton, not the God of Athanasius. Otherwise, asks Newton, “Why were we told of this book [the scroll] if it contained a revelation for the Lamb only, & not for us?”Why did God bring up the subject at all? Newton answers that

It was done in prosecution of the main design of the Apocalypse

It was done in prosecution of the main design of the Apocalypse