The Australian Dead Sea Scrolls expert Barbara Thierlog caused quite a stir by the claims in her book Jesus the Man that Jesus did not die on the cross but lived, with his sons, to take an important role in the evolution of the new underground religion which bore his name.

Here she turns her attention to the Book of Revelation, which she interprets not as a poetic rant about vision and apocalypse, but as an encoded history of the early Christian movement from AD1 to AD114 and she "reveals" the identities of the Great Harlot, the Four Horsemen and the Beast whose number was 666 - the Jewish zealot leader Simon Magus, claims Thiering, with whom Jesus's faction had a major disagreement.