REVELATION 



675 



clearly than elsewhere His will and character. But 

 at the same time we must not confound revelation, 

 in its fact and essence, with the books of Scripture. 

 These books are only the highest or most distin- 

 guished form or medium of revelation, which, in 

 itself, and essentially, must always imply com- 

 munication from one mind to another, and, in a 

 religious sense, from the divine to the human mind. 

 Scripture is, in its several books, regarded as the 

 pre-eminent medium of this contact or interchange 

 of the divine and human, as the record of special 

 communications which God made in time past to 

 holy men, ' who spake as they were moved by the 

 Holy Spirit.' It contains, in short, a revelation for 

 us ; but the revelation is not the record, but the 

 knowledge which the record conveys to our minds. 

 See BIBLE, INSPIRATION. 



Revelation, BOOK OF, the last book of the 

 New Testament canon. Tradition. In the oldest 

 extant MSS. the title is simply ' Apocalypse [i.e. 

 Revelation j of John' (ApokcUypsis loannou), and 

 thus does not go beyond what the book itself 

 declares. The further designation of the author 

 in the texttis receptus ( followed by the Authorised 

 Version) as John 'the divine' has no good MS. 

 authority, but is an echo of the undoubtedly early 

 tradition which identities him with the author of 

 the fourth gospel (who was called theologos, trans- 

 lated ' the divine," first by Eusebius, because he 

 begins his gospel not with the earthly genealogy of 

 Jesus but with the doctrine of the divinity of the 

 Logos), and of the tradition which identifies the 

 author of both works with John, the son of Zebedee, 

 one of the twelve apostles. Other comparatively 

 ancient forms of the title, still more explicit in this 

 sense, are ' The Kevelation of John the Divine ami 

 Evangelist,' and ' The Kevelation of the Apostle 

 and Evangelist John.' 



The ' Apocalypse of John ' is included in the 

 Muratorian canon ; it was also reckoned by Origen 

 among the 'homologoumena' or 'acknowledged' 

 books of New Testament Scripture. It was 

 held in high esteem by Iren;eus, Hippolytus, 

 Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian. Justin 

 Martyr (circa 147) makes reference to it as the 

 work of the apostle John, and it was used by 

 Theophilus of Antioch (circa 180) and Apollonius, 

 and commented on by Melito of Sardis (circa 170). 

 Outside the Catholic Church it was accepted by the 

 Montanists. On the other hand, it was rejected by 

 those whom Epiphanius calls Alogi and by the Mar- 

 cionites, while within the Roman church its claims 

 were disputed by an ecclesiastic named Gains or 

 Caius ; his arguments in turn were controverted 

 in an apologetic writing by his contemporary, 

 Hippolytus. It is mentioned as one of the ' anti- 

 legoraena ' or ' disputed ' works by Eusebins ; it is 

 absent from the Syriac, and from the Memphitic 

 and Thebaic ( Egyptian ) versions of the Scripture, 

 and from the lists of Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory 

 Nazianzen, and Chrysostom, as well as from the 

 canon of the Council of Laodicea, and from the so- 

 called ' apostolic canons.' There is no trustworthy 

 evidence that Papias knew it. 



As regards authorship, the book itself claims to 

 be written by 'John, the servant of Jesus Christ,' 

 ' who bare witness of all things that he saw ; ' and 

 it is to be observed that many of the incidental 

 references to it in early writers are evidently mere 

 repetitions of this statement. But the reception 

 of the Apocalypse into the canon was no doubt 

 partly determined by the belief that this John was 

 the son of Zebedee. This belief is implied in the 

 Muratorian canon, and that he was the apostle is 

 categorically stated by Justin Martyr and IreniPiis. 

 Dionysiusof Alexandria (circa 260), however, while 

 not disputing the canonicity of the book, found 

 himself unable to overcome the arguments of 



certain who had preceded him against its apostolic 

 authorship, and he accordingly assigned it to ' some 

 other ' John perhaps ( he thought ) John the Pres- 

 byter. Eusebius with some deliuiteness assigned 

 it to the last named. 



As to the time of its composition tradition is far 

 from consistent. The author of the Muratorian 

 fragment, for example, incidentally places it 

 earlier than the Pauline epistles ; but Irenaeus 

 expressly states that it ' was seen towards the 

 close of the reign of Domitian.' This statement of 

 Irenieus is sometimes interpreted as implying that 

 the book was also written then ; but more probably 

 he intended his readers to understand that it was 

 written after Domitian 's death under Nerva, or 

 perhaps even in the reign of Trajan, to which 

 period, according to Irenwus, the apostle survived. 

 But Tertullian seems to suggest the time of Nero 

 as the date. Jerome dates the supposed banish- 

 ment of John certainly, and the writing probably, 

 in the 14th year of Domitian ; but in this, perhaps, 

 he is only repeating Irena'us. There is some reason 

 to think that this date is partly derived from 

 an interpretation of Rev. i. 9 which is not now 

 usually accepted. Epiphanius mentions the time 

 of Claudius. The place where the revelation was 

 received is profoxsrdly Patinos, and ancient writers 

 usually assumed that it was also committed to 

 writing there. 



The discussions of the Apocalypse by Melito and 

 others have not been preserved ; but from the 

 earliest extant commentary that of Victorinus 

 (circa 300) it may be inferred that no systematic 

 attempt at a consistent interpretation of the work 

 as a whole was undertaken by any ancient writer. 

 Attention was for the most part confined to two or 

 three isolated points. It need hardly be said that, 

 as regarded the millennium, the ancient church 

 was entirely of the ' futurist ' school, and that in 

 those quarters where the Apocalypse was most 

 prized as an authentic vision of the future the 

 interpretation always tended to be literalist and 

 'chihastic. ' As for another conspicuous feature 

 tin 1 beast and the number of the beast (see APOCA- 

 LYPTIC NUMBER ) it is surprising how early the key 

 to this enigma seems to have been lost. Irena'us 

 confesses ignorance, and can only resort to timid 

 and tentative conjecture. Victorinus, however, 

 explained Rev. xiii. 3 as having reference to Nero ; 

 and so also did Sulpicius Severus. To Origen and 

 the Alexandrians, with their allegorising methods 

 of interpretation, the problems of the Apocalypse 

 were of comparatively little interest. Later, after 

 the time of Constantine, the ' beast ' was identified 

 with pagan Rome, or the seven heads of the beast 

 with seven world-empires, and Augustine was one 

 of the first to give currency to a form of ' preter- 

 ism,' holding that the millennium began with the 

 Christian era a belief which again became active 

 in the llth century. With the lapse of time came 

 almost inevitable modifications, both of the pre- 

 terist and of the futurist view, alike among those 

 who held that the threefold series of visions ( seals, 

 trumpets, vials) in the book related to chronologi- 

 cally successive events, and to those who, with 

 Augustine, viewed them as parallel (theory of 

 ' recapitulation ' ). Medi.-rval sects recognised the 

 papacy in the woman on the scarlet beast, an inter- 

 pretation which afterwards in one form or another 

 became widely current throughout the Protestant 

 domain, and still holds its ground in many quarters. 

 Modern Criticism. The modern criticism of the 

 Apocalypse may in a sense l>e said to have begun 

 with Luther, who in the preface to the first edition 

 of his New Testament ( 1522 ) declared that for many 

 reasons he was unable to accept this book as either 

 apostolic or prophetic 'My spirit cannot adapt 

 itself to the book.' The chief reasons he alleged 



