Les chevaux colorés de l'« apocalypse »

Abstract

The coloured horses of the "Revelation" of John How can we explain the « functional » pattern of the four riders, in the "Revelation of John" ? If the passage refers to one of the night visions to be found in "Proto-Zechariah", the colours - white, red, black - and the attributes - bow, sword, and a set of scales - clearly relate back to an Indo-European pattern, which corresponds to the three functions defined by Dumézil, to which some would propose to add a fourth function, embodied here by the last « pale » horse. One then can very likely infer that the text might have been devised by the author out of data borrowed from Iranian sources. Such borrowings are to be replaced within the current of exchanges that fared between Jewish-Christians traditions and Indo-Europeans ones, a process that partly led to the development of apocalyptic trends.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.