Revelation 12

Revelation 12 is the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The book is traditionally attributed to John the Apostle, but the precise identity of the author remains a point of academic debate. This chapter contains the accounts about the woman, the dragon, and the child, followed by the war between Michael and the dragon, then the appearance of the monster from the sea. William Robertson Nicoll, a Scottish Free Church minister, suggests that in this chapter the writer has created a Christianised version of a Jewish source which "described the birth of the Messiah in terms borrowed from ... cosmological myths [such as] that of the conflict between the sun-god and the dragon of darkness and the deep".

While others have said the passages correspond to Greco-Roman combat legends involving dragons, there are distinctions between the Python myths known during the 1st and 2nd Century CE and Revelations. According to David Barr, the Egyptian conflict of Set-Typhon who pursues the goddess Isis, is said to fit better, as the chaos creature is consistently depicted as a red animal, and attacks heaven casting down various stars and constellations.