Revelation 20:1–6

Revelation 20:1–6 — The Fulcrum Text

This passage is the single most contested unit in the entire book, and it's exactly where Wright's "AD 70 fulfillment" framework runs into the most resistance from the plain sense of the Greek. Let's walk through it.

The Greek Text (Key Phrases)

20:2 — καὶ ἔδησεν αὐτὸν χίλια ἔτη (v.2, "and bound him a thousand years")
20:4 — καὶ ἔζησαν καὶ ἐβασίλευσαν μετὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ [τὰ] χίλια ἔτη
       ("and they lived/came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years")
20:5 — οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη.
       αὕτη ἡ ἀνάστασις ἡ πρώτη.
       ("the rest of the dead did not live until the thousand years were finished.
       This is the first resurrection.")

The verb ἔζησαν ("they lived" / "came to life") in verse 4 is the crux. It is the same verb, in the same aorist tense, used of the martyrs' resurrection as is used elsewhere in Revelation for bodily, historical resurrection (compare its usage pattern with 2:8, "who died and came to life," referring to Christ's literal resurrection). This is the linguistic knife-edge the whole debate turns on.

Translation-by-Translation

Translation	Rendering of v.4	Notable Choice
KJV	"lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years"	Straightforward, literal; no interpretive gloss
NASB	"they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years"	"Came to life" — slightly sharper than "lived," emphasizes the resurrection-event sense of ἔζησαν
ESV	"they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years"	Same as NASB — most formal-equivalence translations agree here
NIV	"They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years"	Identical to ESV/NASB
NRSV	"came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years"	Same
NLT	"They came to life again and reigned with Christ for a thousand years"	Adds "again," reinforcing the resurrection reading even more explicitly

What's striking: there is almost no translation variance here across the theological spectrum — evangelical, mainline, and Catholic translation committees all render ἔζησαν as "came to life," which strongly implies bodily resurrection, not merely "began to reign" or "were vindicated." The unanimity itself is evidence: this is not a case where translation philosophy is doing interpretive work for you. The Greek is fairly unambiguous lexically. The disagreement is entirely hermeneutical, happening downstream of translation.

Why This Matters for the Wright Critique

Here is the precise problem for an over-realised eschatology: verse 5 explicitly distinguishes two resurrections separated by a temporal interval ("the rest of the dead did not live until the thousand years were finished"). Whatever one makes of the millennium itself (premillennial, amillennial, postmillennial — that's a separate debate), the text's own grammar insists on:

1. A resurrection of some (the martyrs, v.4) — called explicitly "the first resurrection"
2. A period of reign
3. A second, subsequent event including "the rest of the dead" and final judgment (vv. 11–13)

If, per Wright, the "end of the age" apocalyptic material in Revelation is substantially fulfilled or fulfilled-in-principle by AD 70, then this two-stage resurrection structure becomes very difficult to locate anywhere in history. It cannot be read as a symbol for AD 70, because AD 70 involved no literal resurrection of martyrs, no binding of Satan in any observable sense, and no subsequent "second" resurrection thirty, three hundred, or two thousand years downstream. The text's own internal chronology — a first resurrection, an interval, then a second resurrection and final judgment — presses toward a still-future, two-stage eschatological event that cannot be collapsed into a single first-century geopolitical catastrophe without doing real violence to what John actually wrote.

One More Textual Nuance Worth Flagging

Verse 4's phrase τὰ χίλια ἔτη ("the thousand years") has the definite article in the better manuscripts by verse 4 (having been introduced anarthrously in v.2) — a small but real grammatical signal that John is treating this as a specific, bounded, real period within his vision, not a vague symbolic gesture. Whether "a thousand years" is literal or symbolic-but-real (my own inclination, following much of the Augustinian-amillennial tradition, is symbolic-but-real — a complete, divinely-ordained period, not necessarily 365,000 days) is a separate question from whether the event it describes — bodily resurrection, reign, then further resurrection and judgment — is future. Even amillennial readings, which spiritualize the duration, typically retain the futurity and reality of the final resurrection and judgment in verses 11–15. Wright's move is different in kind: it's not a debate about whether the thousand years is literal, but whether the entire complex of resurrection-judgment-new-creation has any future referent left at all once AD 70 has absorbed the "end of the age" language.