My monograph in preparation, Eco and Echoes: Intertextuality, Revelation and The Name of the Rose at 50, explores the Book of Revelation using the intertextual theories of semiotician and author Umberto Eco. John’s Apocalypse is an intertextual masterpiece, its 404 verses featuring some one thousand allusions to Jewish scripture (whether in Hebrew or Greek remains open). Prophecy and law undergird a vision of high Christology that rejects accommodation to pagan imperial cults and exhorts his congregations to see themselves as part of God’s cosmic battle with Satan and his agents: the Roman imperial state and emperor.

While Revelation’s intertextuality is well documented, I argue the field oversimplifies the audience(s) response by assuming homogenous, solitary readers. In so doing, we ignore John’s benediction: “Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of prophecy” (Rev 1:3). John’s variegated audience whose members have heterogenous scriptural knowledge would detect, internalize, and reinterpret his hidden and revealed messages with graduated degrees of wisdom.

To address this lacuna, I turn to Umberto Eco and his own intertextual masterpiece, The Name of the Rose. Like Revelation, The Name of the Rose is replete with allusions to the great texts of the western intellectual tradition, its very title evoking without quoting Shakespeare, Bernard of Cluny, and Abelard. In his subsequently published postscript, Eco makes explicit an audience construction I argue is implicit in Revelation. Both stories are intelligible to naïve audiences, but such members certainly know that they are missing the full meaning of the text because they lack what Eco calls “encyclopedia competence.” Without knowledge of Aristotle’s Poetics and Anselm’s Prolegomena or of Moses and Daniel, such audiences lack the wisdom to understand the text as their respective authors intended. Those with a sophisticated extratextual repertoire are rewarded with a literary masterpiece.