My unease about most interpretations of Revelation is that they approach the text as a coded discourse, which then makes their task the decoding of the text. But once one starts there, the possibilities multiply. Frequently, the beast is Rome and the number 666 is Nero, etc. The Anchor Bible commentary thinks the work was by John the Baptist. There seem to be no end to solutions, each rather tenuous. Pagels reads the text from her gnostic perspective, which dismisses both John the Evangelist and Paul as presenting a naive faith and champions the Gospel of Thomas as first century. In effect she is trying to rewrite the entire history of the early church by excising the majority of the NT (Paul 12 texts; John 4). With nostalgia she left the church and joined a Gnostic Community in New York, if memory serves. I like Malina because he can read the text as written without trying to decode it. Rather, he sees the Seer actually seeing his visions in the night sky, reading in the tradition.