Revelation (n.) stays a dead letter however explicit it is, because men keep drawing fresh lies from the original murder, and the lies stop the word from reaching them.
Revelation (n.) of the founding murder proves itself by provoking it: the one who reveals is killed, and the killing confirms what he said.
Revelation (n.) of human violence needs almost limitless patience: centuries must pass before the Gospel's shattering truth can be grasped the world over.
Revelation (n.) is what we misread as occultation: the counterforce in our history that tends to expose the immemorial lie.
Revelation (n.) is a crisis in every representation of persecution from the persecutor's standpoint; the Gospels stress unanimity only to denounce it as nontruth.
Revelation (n.) forces ritual back to its nonritual origin, the undisguised murder: Herodias and Caiaphas are its living allegories.
Revelation (n.) makes the crisis of sacrificial systems inevitable by exposing the persecutors' secret, so the mechanism can never again create a new order of ritual expulsion.
The Revelation (n.) seems a failure because it ends in persecutions that appear to smother it and in fact fulfil it.