What do invented saints tell us about Christianity?

[GrandizerII]

In the Book of Revelation, John also sees a woman "clothed with the sun." But this is not evidence that, outside of mystical visions, he thinks women can wear the sun.

In his mystical vision, he sees a beast with seven heads. But this is not evidence that he thinks such beasts exist outside of mystical visions. 

The fact that he sees something in a mystical vision is not evidence that he thinks it is true in the non-mystical-visionary world.

I think the mysticism of Revelation doesn't really apply to the topic.  John couches his vision (and I wholeheartedly agree that it IS a vision, not a physical description) in terms his audience would understand - nothing wrong in that, all writers (with the possible exception of Joyce) do it.  It's a necessity if you want to get your message across.  No matter how symbolic your speech, you have to use symbols the readers can relate to.

So, when John says, 'After this, I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the Earth', he is using the imagery of a flat Earth, an Earth that has corners.  He doesn't say, 'I saw angels on the land and the sea' or 'I saw angels mustered around the girth of the world' - the specifically uses the term 'corners'.  And I think it's a stretch that he meant something other than 'corners' in the physical sense.  He's trying to convey where in his vision the angels were - at the corners.

One would think that, if his vision came from God, he would have used some other expression that would have indicated a spherical Earth.  Given what he actually wrote, it seems pretty plain that John and his intended readers viewed the Earth as shaped like a square (or possibly rectangular) tabletop.

Boru

Could be an idiom, though, Brian. Like "raining cats and dogs".

And if you think about, if they did believe in a flat earth, did they really think it must have been a rectangular form with sharp corners? I'm not familiar with such flat earth cosmology for those times, but I admit I haven't read enough to know properly.