Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/517

Rh KEVELATION Christ alone, and knows that to be clean a man must wash his robes in the blood of the Lamb ; nowhere has he made a distinction between Gentile aud Jewish Christians ; in this respect he is even more liberal than Paul, for Paul believes in a continued preference accorded to the people of Israel, while our author knows of no such thing; in his view preference is given only to the martyrs and confessors of the latter days ; they alone shall reign with Christ a thousand years ; l the people of Israel, so far as it has rejected Christ, is to our author simply a " synagogue of Satan " (ii. 9 ; iii. 9). In this respect it clearly appears that the author of the Apocalypse has cast aside all national religious prejudices. 2 Accordingly to him Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jews of this there is no mention in the book but the Saviour of the world, the Lord of heaven and of earth, the disposer and director of history. The Christology of the Apocalypse is nowhere Ebionitic; rather it stands midway between that of Paul and that of the Fourth Gospel, and is more elevated than the former : Christ is made almost equal with God and has the same predicates and names as God. 3 The Apocalypse teaches us that even in the apostolic age the conceptions of Paulinism and Ebionitism do not explain everything ; it is neither Pauline nor Ebionitic. It shows us that at the close of the apostolic age there was a Christianity which was free from the law and universal, and yet continued to adhere to Jewish modes of expres- sion ; it shows us that it was possible to think and feel like a Jew in politics, and yet in religious thoughts and feelings to be evangelical and superior to all earthly limitations. These, however, are glaring contradictions which could not last. But the fact that in the Apocalypse we possess a document exhibiting these contradictions imparts to the book its high importance. From Paul's epistles we can only learn how a great mind has worked its way from the letter of the law up to freedom ; from the Apocalypse we can learn how from the Jewish fusion of religion, nation- ality, and politics thousands were gradually led upwards to the gospel, and we can further learn that the step from the premises to the conclusion is one of the hardest to take. The author of the Apocalypse has in many points not yet drawn the conclusions. Date and Historical Position. All impartial scholars are now agreed that in chapters xiii. and xviii. of the Apocalypse we must look for the key to the comprehension of the book as well as to the question of the date of its composition. That the beast (xiii. 1 sq. ; xvii. 3 sq.) is the Roman empire, that the seven heads are seven emperors, that the woman (xvii. 3-9) is the city of Rome, that the ten horns (xiii. 1 ; xvii. 3, 12 sq.) are imperial governors all this is now beyond dispute. 4 Also it is settled that a Roman emperor will be the antichrist, and that the author abhorred nothing so much as the worship of the emperor. Hence it is very probable, and has been maintained by Mommsen especially on good grounds, that the second beast (xiii. 11) is meant to describe the imperial representatives in the provinces, especially the Roman governors in the Asiatic continent. Finally, almost every one regards the year 64 as the terminus a quo of the composition of the book, inasmuch as the bloody persecution of the Christians in Rome (xiii. 1 Observe that in his brief description of the railleninm (ch. xx.) the author neither speaks of the Jewish people nor introduces any grossly material conception. This is the strongest proof that he was not an Ebionite. 2 Compare also xi. 8, where Jerusalem is called "Sodom and Egypt." 3 The Christological conceptions and formulas which occur in the book are not always consistent. This is not, however, in itself a proof of interpolation. 4 Diisterdieck alone regards the ten horns as emperors. 7; xvii. 6; xviii. 20-24) is presupposed in the narra- tive. 5 But, while scholars are at one on these points, they still differ on the question of the person of antichrist. The one side affirm that the author regarded Nero returned from the grave as antichrist (so Ewald, Liicke, De Wette, Credner, Reuss, Volckmar, Mommsen, Renan, &c.) ; the other side deny this (so Weiss, Diisterdieck, Bruston, &c.), and try to identify antichrist either with Domitian or with an emperor not defined. But the grounds on which they combat the former hypothesis are of little moment. That the antichrist of the Apocalypse is Nero returned to life results from the following considerations : (1) In ch. xiii. 3 it is said that one of the heads of the beast received a deadly wound but was afterwards healed to the astonish- ment of the world. Now if it is settled that the beast is the Roman empire, and that by the heads are designated the emperors, the statement is only applicable to Nero, in whose death it is well known that the people did not believe, many persons expecting that he would return from the East. 6 (2) In xvii. 8, 11 one head is identified with the whole animal, aud of the animal it is said that "it was and is uot and will come again," meaning that the eighth head is not a new one but one of the seven. From this it necessarily follows that in the author's view the antichrist will be- an emperor who has reigned once already and who represents the whole wickedness of the empire (the beast) concentrated and embodied in himself ; but this can only be Nero, for of no other emperor was the report current in the empire that he would come again, and no emperor but Nero had instituted a persecution of the Christians. (3) In xiii. 18 it is said that the number of the beast that is, according to the Hebrew art of Gematria, the sum of the numerical values of the letters of his name is the number of a man, and is 666. Down to 1835 this saying was a riddle which no man could read, though Irenseus (v. 30) had attempted an explana- tion : he thought of Teitan, Evanthes, Lateiuos. But in 1835 Fritzsche, Benary, Reuss, and Hitzig discovered simultaneously that the numerical values of the words }1"U ~lDp ("Emperor Neroii ") = 100 + 60 + 200 + 50 + 200 + 6 -f 50 = 666. The old variant 616 must be regarded as a confirmation of this explanation, for 616 is =113 IDp ("Emperor Nero"). It may certainly appear strange that the calculation is made according to the numerical value of the Hebrew letters, while the book is written in Greek ; but, as there- is no doubt that the author has thought as a Semite from first to last, it is not surprising that he has set forth his great secret in Hebrew letters (comp. ' Appayfticbv, xvi. 16). (4) Down to the 5th. century it was believed by Western Christians that Nero would come again and be the antichrist or his precursor. 7 In the East also this belief can be shown (see the Sibylline oracles) to have still existed in the 2d century. For these four reasons it is certain that the author of the Apocalypse believed that Nero would come again, and regarded him as the antichrist. He wrote under the impression of the story current in the East that Nero had gone to the Parthiaus and would return with them to reclaim his empire. Hence the Apocalypse was written after the summer of 68 A.D., 8 but the question still remains whether it was written under Galba or Vespasian or Domitian. Most of the scholars who accept the right explanation of the antichrist suppose it to have been written under Galba ; the beginning of Vespasian's reign is preferred by Liicke (whose earlier opinion was different), Bleek, Bohnier, and also Diisterdieck and Weiss ; Mommsen" upholds the later years of Vespasian ; but the old tradition of the church 5 The statement of Epiphanius (Hazr., li. 12) that the Apocalypse was written under Claudius is untenable. 6 Bruston refers the wounded head to Caesar ; but what could have induced the author to mention and put in the foreground an event which had taken place about one hundred years before ? 7 See the Carm. Apolog. of Commodian ; the commentary of Victorinus on the Apocalypse ; Lactantius, De Mort. Persee., 2 ; Martin of Tours in Snip. Severus, Dial., ii. 14 ; Sulp. Sev., Chron., ii. 28, 29, &c. 8 Against Bruston, who supposes that it was written between 64 and 68 A.D., by reckoning the emperors (xvii. 10) from Csesar, and hence taking the reigning emperor to be Nero. But Bruston is thus compelled to reject the explanation that the returned Nero is the antichrist, and he cannot account for the mention in the Apocalypse of numerous martyrs at Rome.