Alter of Pergamon
September 8, 2026
Revelation 2:12-17 - Message to Pergamum
12 “And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write:
The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this:
13 ‘I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is; and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells. 14 But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality. 15 So you also have some who in the same way hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16 Therefore repent; or else I am coming to you quickly, and I will make war against them with the sword of My mouth. 17 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.’
A curious event was in the news this week. An unruly passenger on an American Airlines jet traveling from Dallas to Newark caused the flight to be diverted because of his outburst of anger. It turns out that the seat mate that he was upset with was Rabi Jonathan Cahn that was returning from Dallas where he was launching his latest book, “The Alter of Pergamon. The Mystery of the Dark Angel & the Future of the World”. Apparently, the sight of the book cover and being witnessed to by Pastor Cahn upset the demons in him so much that he had an uncontrollable outburst of rage that caused him to be duck taped to his seat until the FBI could escort him off the plane in Baltimore. So what is in the book that could cause such an outburst? You can read the book yourself, but here is the timeline of events surrounding the alter of Pergamon which is curious, to say the least.
The alter to the Greek god Zeus was built on the acropolis of the city of Pergamon, which is in present day Turkey, in the second century BC.
In the first century, AD, the book of Revelation documents the death of the martyr Antipas in Pergamon. He was reportedly the first martyr killed outside of Israel. In John’s Apocalypse, he refers the the alter as Satan’s seat. In John’s day, Pergamon was a center of emperor warship, and the Romans referred to Zeus as Jupiter. Pergamon was a major city in the Roman empire until an earthquake in 262 AD that damaged the city and destroyed many of the pagan alters there.
After the fall of Rome, Pergamon was part of the Ottoman empire, and the alter of Pergamon remained buried under rubble for centuries.
in 1871, a German engineer by the name of Carl Humann, began the excavation of the alter. He shipped some artifacts from the alter to Germany. In 1878, a major exaction was initiated, and large parts of he alter were unearthed and shipped to Berlin. The first Pergamon museum was built in Berlin to display the alter in 1987 to 1899. Delayed by the first world war, a larger museum to display the entire alter was not built until 1930.
1871 marked the end of the Franci-Prussian war that formed the nation of Germany.
Also in 1871, another german, Schliemann, was excavating the ancient city of Troy when he discovered a tall monument capped by a giant hooked cross which became know as the swastika, the symbol of the Nazi party in Germany.
in 1871, a new philosophy was born out of hatred for the Jew and the term “Anti-Semitism” was born. In 1878, the first anti-Semitic party was formed and this was the same year that Humann began to major excavations around the alter in Pergamon, and continued until 1886. In 1878, the Ottoman empire suffered a major defeat and began to decline as a major world power.
In 1889, Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braumau am Inn. This was also the year that the reconstruction of the alter was completed in Berlin.
in 1914, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, kicking off the first world war. By the end of the war, the Austria-Humgary empire and the Ottoman empire were no more and German was devastated.
In 1975, Adam Glauer (aka Rudolf von Sebottendorff) was born in Germany. He would go on to found the Thule Society, which brought the study of occult knowledge to Germany, and had a great influence in the thinking of Adolph Hitler. The Thule Society later became known as the Nazi partly.
in 1930, the new Pergamon museum opened in Berlin to display the reconstructed Pergamon alter, and in that same year, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party won a majority of seats in the Reichstag for the first time. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was in the fall of 1930 when many Jewish neighborhoods were trashed and many Jews were injured. The unveiling of the reconstructed alter in it’s new museum, was on October 2, 1930, which was Yom Kippur that year.
Hitler had a reproduction of the alter built in Nuremberg and was the site of many of his speeches, which incited the German people to war. By 1939, the second world war had begun.
On April 22, 1945, the alien armies took Nuremberg and destroyed the giant swastika that sat atop the Pergamon platform. On the same day, Berlin was taken and Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the city.
An alter demands a sacrifice. The Greek word for a burnt is custos, and the word for offering is Halos… which is where we get the word Holocaust. The Nazis began their holocaust at Dachau and their high priest was Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. The SS took charge of the camp at Dachau on April 11, 1933, Passover, and executed the first Jews the next day.
Auschwitz is Polish for “holy place”, and the concentration camp there had continual smoke from the crematoriums… an unholy fire.
Karl Marx was born in the German city of Trier, home of the Roman structure, Porta Nigra, the Black Gate which a portal to the dark world. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was first published in 1848 and several revolutions broke out across Europe. It was republished in the 1872 as The Communist Manifesto, and began to be widely read in Germany and across Europe.
in 1886, the unearthing and transferring of the alter of Pergamon was completed and that was the year the Lenin’s father died. That was the point at which he left the church and began to study communism and the works of Karl Marx.
When Joseph Stalin began to study the works of Marx, he was expelled from the seminary and became a full-time Marxist agent and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was born in 1878, the same year as the unearthing of the alter.
In April 1945, the Red Army occupied the eastern half of Berlin and took possession of the alter of Pergamon. The alter had been disassembled and hidden during the war. The Red Army transported the pieces to St. Petersburg, then renamed to Leningrad. In the 1940’s, Stalin ordered the persecution of the Jewish people in Russia and the Soviet empire. During the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, Communism spread throughout the world, to China in the east and Cuba and Venezuela in the west. The alter remained in Leningrad until 1958, when it was transported back to the museum in East Berlin.
From 1958 to 1962, the US and the USSR were at the height of the cold war and nuclear holocaust nearly broke out over the Berlin Crisis and the Cuba missile crisis. The first nuclear bomb test was on July 16, 1945 in White Sands. Many of the key scientists in the Manhattan project were Jewish physicists who had fled Nazi Germany.
The alter remained under Soviet control until 1989 when the Berlin wall fell leading to the reunification of Germany in 1990. This eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union. The alter of Pergamon is still in Berlin, and is the control of the European Union. The next world crisis could be the rise of a one world government, the New World Order, Centered in Europe. Another interesting factoid mentioned by Cahn here is that the Hebrew letter for w is vav. It is the sixth letter, so the numeric value of the world wide web, www, in Hebrew is 666.
In July 2008, Barak Obama was running for president and gave a speech in Berlin at the Tiergarten where the Nazis had hidden the alter during the war. When Obama gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he spoke from a stage that was a recreation of the alter of Pergamon.
https://booksbyjonathancahn.com/
