The Johannine Writings/Part II, Chapter IV

CHAPTER IV.

THE "REVELATION" OF JOHN. __________________________________________________________________

1. VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS.

THE last book of the New Testament is called "Revelation" (Gk.  Apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ, but after we have pored over the books--far more than a thousand--which have been written in the past years to explain it, it must appear so obscure that the seven seals which are mentioned in the book (chapters v. f.; viii. 1) as closing over the fate of humanity and being loosened one after another, must seem to clasp the book itself firmly together and to refuse to be  broken.

It has been supposed to prophesy the whole history of the Church and even of the world, in each case of course down to the lifetime of the expositor, and nearly always in a different way. In the beast described in xiii. 1-10; xvii. 7-18, people have recognised emperor after emperor, pope after pope, one leader after another of the Vandals, Muhammedans, and Turks, as well as Luther, Napoleon I., Napoleon III., and the French General Boulanger (1891); and, besides these, even impersonal things, such as apostasy, godlessness, the Catholic Church, and, to mention only one other thing, Smallpox. In a revelation of  Jesus Christ men would fain expect to read nothing less than every thing which had determined the fate of humanity since its appearance. In proportion as people could show for certain that what had already happened was prophesied in it, they might also rest assured that all that it said about a time still to come would be correctly unravelled.

All this mass of ingenuity and error might of course have been seen from the beginning to be useless, if people had only taken note, amongst other things, of the first verse and the last verse but one in  the book. We are told in i. 1 (and xxii. 6) that the revelation of  Jesus Christ is "to shew unto his servants the things which must   shortly come to pass." And this does not mean "which must soon begin,  and then go on for thousands of years," for in xxii. 20 (as well as in  iii. 11; xxii. 7, 12) Jesus says, "I come quickly," that is to say, to   introduce the end of the world. The author of the book, accordingly, expected the end of the world in his own lifetime; and if we wish to  understand the curious figures in which he described it, we must try to   interpret them in the light of the ideas which prevailed at the time. __________________________________________________________________

2. COMBINATION OF SEPARATE FRAGMENTS.

But first we must realise clearly that in this book we have not to do  with a single author. The visions which he is supposed to have seen in  it follow upon one another with so little regard to order that it has already been thought that he could not have seen them all one after another, but after each must have had time to note it down; other wise he would not have been in a position to note them all in their right order. No less than six times we find the "last things," which from what has already been said we might think are to follow (viii. 1; xi.  15-19; xiv. 20; xvi. 17-21; xviii. 21-24; xix. 21), described before the real conclusion of the book. In every case we meet with a  self-contained picture only in a particular section of the narrative, and for the most part this never extends to a whole chapter.

It has been noticed that chap. xxiv. of Mt.'s Gospel (not so literally  in Mk. xiii., and in Lk. xxi. in a version which differs still more) incorporates a very small publication in which events are described which are supposed to happen immediately before or at the end of the world. Mt. xxiv. 6-8, 15-22, 29-31, 34, that is to say, do not fit into the sections between which they are placed, but connect together all the better. These verses, which have been called a "little Apocalypse," and which now appear as the words of Jesus only by an entire misapprehension, may very well have been a leaflet published and spread abroad at the time of direst need in order to call the attention of the faithful to signs by which they might recognise the near approach of  the end of the world, and to warn them. In xxiv. 15 we even read, "let  him that readeth under stand," though Jesus would have been obliged to   say, "let him that heareth."

Such leaflets may still be discovered in the Apocalypse of Jn. as well. It is difficult to say whether the writer who put together the whole book was the first to insert them, or whether earlier workers did so, each of them publishing only a part of the present book; and the matter is of subordinate importance. Particular stones in the building attract attention and can be separated more easily than those sections of the walls which have been constructed by one or another foreman. __________________________________________________________________

3. A LEAFLET ON THE FATE OF JERUSALEM.

In Rev. xi. 1-13 we can recognise a leaflet which is quite similar to  the little Apocalypse in Mt. xxiv., and belongs to the last years before August 70 A.D., when the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed by  the Imperial Prince, Titus. We learn from xi. 1 f. that the heathen might tread upon the outer fore-court of the Temple and the rest of the holy city of Jerusalem, but might not touch "the temple of God, and the  altar, and them that worship therein." Often enough two, and even three, hostile parties had struggled for months without result inside the walls of Jerusalem. Just before Easter of the year 70 one of the three parties was in possession of the Temple with the inner fore-court, the other of the rest of the Temple hill, the third of the rest of the city. The author was therefore entirely justified by the events of the time in his expectation, even if in the end he was baffled by the destruction of the Temple.

He cannot, of course, have been a Christian if Jesus supposed prophecy, "there shall not be left here one stone upon another" (Mk. xiii. 2), was well known. And Jesus may very well have uttered such a prophecy, even if we refuse to credit him with omniscience. By simply exercising human powers of reflection, it was not difficult to foresee the fall of  the Temple. But since this prophecy may also have been ascribed to  Jesus subsequently, it is still possible that it was a Christian who gave expression to the contrary prophecy in his leaflet (Rev. xi.  1-13). __________________________________________________________________

4. PROPHECY CONCERNING ROME AND THE FIRST BEAST.

But the city of Rome takes an even more important place than Jerusalem in the Apocalypse. Fear of the authorities, who might think the prophecies about it dangerous to the State, leads the author to mention the city not by its real name, but by that of Babylon, which, as was well known, was in the Old Testament associated with an equal amount of  wickedness; but xvii. 5 f., 9, 18 make it clear enough to every intelligent reader what city is meant. In chap. xviii., which, like xi. 1-13, may have been a separate leaflet, the description of its overthrow is quite different from that given in the other parts of the book.

In these we find connected with it the most important figure in the whole Apocalypse, the (first) beast, that is to say, the Roman imperium. It supports and carries the woman, as the city of Rome is  also called (xvii. 3, 7), it has a throne, kingdom, dominion over the world (xiii. 2, 7; xvi. 10), and, in particular, seven heads, that is  to say, as we learn in xvii. 9 f., seven kings, of whom the first five have fallen, one is now reigning, and the seventh is still to come. The first five Roman emperors, who are here intended, were Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. The author of chap. xvii. therefore writes after Nero's death, which took place on the 9th of  June in the year 68; and the same date suits chap. xiii. Nero, it is  true, had no real successors; but Galba, Otho, and Vitellius struggled for the mastery until Vespasian seized it for himself in December of  the year 69. Yet it is by no means certain that he was numbered as the sixth, and that the one and a half years of the dispute about the succession are excluded. A person who lived in the second half of the year 68 could only say, as our author does, "the sixth emperor is now  reigning," though in other parts of the extensive Roman empire his rule was disputed.

There is something else which suggests that the time intended is that immediately following Nero's death. By the beast we are not always meant to understand the Roman imperium in general, but sometimes a  single emperor. There is no mistake when it is said in xiii. 7 f., "and  there was given to him (that is to say, the beast) authority over every   tribe . . . and all that dwell on the earth shall worship him" and in   xiii. 14, "to the beast who hath the stroke of the sword, and lived." Add to this xvii. 8, 11: "the beast . . . was and (now) is not, and is  about to come up out of the abyss . . . and the beast that was, and is   not, is himself the eighth, and at the same time is one of the seven   (Roman Emperors), and he goeth into perdition."

To which Roman Emperor does this apply? When Nero saw that his rule was at an end, he fled in the company of a few persons to an estate, and on  hearing his pursuers approaching, with the help of his secretary he cut his throat with a sword. His corpse was solemnly burned. But his friends, especially amongst the mob, refused to believe that he was dead; they imagined that he had made his escape and would shortly return and wrest back his power.

A heathen could not reconcile these two accounts of Nero's end; but a  Christian (or a Jew), believing as he did in a resurrection, could very well do so. Accordingly, all that we read about the beast in the Apocalypse would apply to Nero: the sword-wound, the death, the return from the underworld, to which every one went when he died, and the statement that this risen person who is to appear as the eighth emperor, was one of the seven preceding emperors. We know indeed that impostors were continually coming forward and claiming to be Nero. The very first, who arose as early as the year in which Nero died, created a disturbance for months along the whole of the west coast of Asia Minor as well as in Greece. And this makes it probable that these sections of the Apocalypse date from that time, and so from 68 or 69.

Those who, as we mentioned above, claim that the sixth place must be  assigned to the Emperor Vespasian, and that this was the reign in which the author lived, may still discover the reason for his statements in  the appearance of this false Nero, if they suppose that they were written in the first period of Vespasian, that is to say at the be  ginning of the year 70. On the other hand, the next false Nero of whom we hear did not appear at the end of the reign of Vespasian, but in the days of his successor, Titus. But a person who wrote in this reign (79-81) could in no circumstances say that he was living in the reign of the sixth Emperor.

It has been thought that the expectation that the resuscitated Nero would be the eighth Emperor could only have been held when the seventh had already ascended the throne; otherwise a seventh would not have been prophesied. But the writer's conviction that Rome would have seven emperors was drawn from the Old Testament book of Daniel. This represents the matter in such a way that it might have been composed in  the sixth century B.C. (in reality it was not written until 167-164   B.C.), and prophesies in vii. 1-8 that there will appear one after another a lion, a bear, a panther with four heads, and another terrible beast with ten horns. According to vii. 17, what are meant are four empires which will rule the world one after another, the Babylonian down to 539 B.C., the Median which really ended as early as 550, the Persian, 539-330, to which the author assigns four kings instead of  eleven, and the Greek with ten kings in Syria, to the last among whom the Jews were subject.

Since the author of the Apocalypse does not pretend, like the book of  Daniel, to prophesy so many centuries before the time in which he   really lived, he speaks of only one world-wide empire, that of Home. Since, however, the book of Daniel and its description of the empires ruling the world was held to be a divine prophecy, which in the author's lifetime still waited for fulfilment, he (or one of his  predecessors) has made its four beasts into one, which now, according to xiii. 1 f., has at the same time the characteristics of the lion, the bear, and the panther, and the ten horns of the fourth beast, but the seven heads of all four which these have all together. The idea that the end of the world is at hand is reckoned with, in spite of the seventh emperor, by representing in xvii. 10 that he will reign for a  short time.

Here again we can note well how the Apocalypse borrows its descriptions from an older prophecy, which it held to be sacred, and how at the same time it adapts this prophecy to its own present. This enables us to  understand fully such a figure as that of the beast, which is really very curious. In other cases as well, the author continually takes his expressions and even whole sentences from the Old Testament. It may be, however, that several remarkable descriptions in the book are derived from other old prophecies, perhaps suggested by myths about the gods of  the Babylonians or Persians. __________________________________________________________________

5. THE NUMBER 666.

The last point which confirms us in thinking that Nero is meant by the beast consists in the famous number (xiii. 18): "He that hath  understanding, let him count the number of the beast; for it is the   number of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty and six." The number of a man, or as it is said in xiii. 17, the number of the name of the beast is the number which results when all the numbers are added which are indicated by the letters of the name. In Latin only a few letters (I, V, X, L, C, M, D) are used for numbers, but in Greek and Hebrew all. Now the number 666 does really result when we write N(e)ron K(e)s(a)r (that is to say, Emperor Nero) in Hebrew letters and add up  the numbers: 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 (the letters in   brackets are not written in Hebrew). The number 666 also results from more than a hundred other solutions which have been suggested. But, apart from other reasons which show that the many popes, princes, and so forth down to the present time which people have tried to find in  the beast, cannot be intended, no such calculation has been hit upon which might at the same time give 616 as the correct number. And yet there must be this alternative, for in many copies of the Apocalpyse even before the time of Irenaeus, that is to say, before 185, 616 is  given as the number instead of 666, And this is the number we get if an   "n" is omitted from Neron Kesar, which represents the number 50: Nero Kesar. This, too, would suit very well, for where Latin was spoken people said Nero, whereas the Greek form, familiar to the author of the Apocalypse himself, is Neron. It was natural to him to use Hebrew for the calculation, for in any case it was his mother-tongue, and it would make it less easy for uninitiated persons to solve the riddle. Irenaeus himself no longer knew the solution. It was rejected because Nero failed to return. __________________________________________________________________

6. TIME OF COMPOSITION.

The most important sections of the book, that concerning Jerusalem, and those about the return of Nero from the underworld, date therefore in  all probability from the years 68-70. None of the others indicates so  clearly the date at which it came into existence. We ask therefore at  once when the whole book may be supposed to have been put together. And here Irenaeus tells us that the Apocalypse was revealed and written down at the end of the reign of the Emperor Domitian, that is to say, in the year 95 or 96. We have already seen (p. 194 f.) how little we  can rely on Irenaeus in such matters. But in this case we have no  definite reason to dispute that the date he fixes for the composition of the Apocalypse is appropriate enough for the putting together of the whole book. __________________________________________________________________

7. THE AUTHOR NOT THE AUTHOR OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

But who is the author (or compiler) of the whole Apocalypse? In any case, it is not the same person who wrote the Fourth Gospel. The two works are fundamentally different.

If the Gospel is not written in good Greek style, the style is at any rate smooth; the Apocalypse has very serious linguistic mistakes. Moreover, in both works Jesus is called the Lamb, but in each case a  different Greek word is used. The Evangelist knows nothing about the things which are most important to the author of the Apocalypse, about the terrible events before the end of the world, about the descent of  Christ and his army from the sky on white horses for the great battle with the kings of the earth, about the peaceful millennial rule of the faithful after their resurrection, about the Jerusalem which is to come down from heaven and is 12,000 stadia--say, a third of the radius of  the earth--in length, breadth, and height, and consists of gold transparent like glass (xix. 11-21; xx. 1-6; xxi. 9-xxii. 5), &c.; and he cannot have wished to know anything about these things, since his style of thought was averse to all such expectations. Nor may we go so  far as to assume that both men belonged to one and the same circle of   kindred spirits. The most we can say is that the Apocalypse may have still been held in honour by those who held the same views as the Evangelist; he himself was far superior to its style of thought, and shows only in isolated cases that he was familiar with it but not, for in stance, where it is said that Jesus "is the Logos of God." In Rev. xix. 13 this is a later addition, for his name "no one knoweth, but he  himself" (verse 12). __________________________________________________________________

8. THE AUTHOR NOT THE APOSTLE JOHN.

As we cannot ascribe the Gospel to the Apostle John, it is still possible that he may have written the Apocalypse (in i. 1, 4 the author  calls himself John and a servant of Christ; in xxii. 9 a prophet). But, in that case we may be sure he would not call Jesus, exactly as if he  were God, the Alpha and Omega, that is to say, as is expressly explained, the first and the last (literally the first and last letter  of the Greek Alphabet; see xxii. 13; i. 17; ii. 8, just as in i. 8;   xxi. 6), nor describe him as the first link of God's creation, if not as the author of God's creation (iii. 14). We found such expressions in  the Fourth Gospel, but not in the Synoptics. And how can a personal disciple of Jesus imagine him in heaven as a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, "standing as though it had been slain," and then taking a  book from the hand of God and breaking its seals (v. 6-9; vi. 1), or   conceive of him as he is described in i. 13-16? But even if he took such sections as these from another book and incorporated them in his own, we might expect that expression would be given at the same time to  his own recollection of the life of Jesus. And yet almost the only case in which this is done is in the statement that Jesus is "the true  witness" (i. 5; iii. 14), and we cannot be sure that this does not mean that Jesus is now testifying in heaven that what is prophesied in the Apocalypse is true (such is the idea in i. 2). We need only add that according to xxi. 14 the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb, that is to say, of Christ, are written on the twelve foundation-stones of  the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem. Had one of these same apostles written this or even merely incorporated it in his book, we should be  obliged to regard it in the same way as the title, "the disciple whom   Jesus loved," if by this the Fourth Evangelist meant himself (pp.   179-181). __________________________________________________________________

9. THE AUTHOR JOHN THE ELDER?

It is different if we think of John the Elder (p. 172 f.) as the final editor of the Apocalypse. This would explain the fact (which would also  be appropriate if the author were the Apostle John) that the Jews are always represented as the chosen people of God (vii. 1-8), and that it  is forbidden to eat flesh taken from a victim offered to a heathen idol (ii. 14, 20), though Paul declared it to have been allowed in principle (1 Cor. x. 25-27, 29b, 30) and only forbids it when a sensitive Christian who thought it for bidden might be offended by it (1 Cor.  viii. 7-13; x. 28, 29 a), or when people, by sharing in the festivities, recognised the idol as a real god (1 Cor. x. 20 f .) In  this matter a strongly Jewish sentiment in favour of the Law of the Old Testament still pervades the Apocalypse.

We know further, as regards John the Elder (but not also as regards the  Apostle), that he was very much interested in prophecies of the end of   the world, and imagined, for example, that after the resurrection of   the dead there would be on earth a millennial kingdom full of peace and happiness and ruled by Christ, exactly as it is described in Rev. xx. 1-6.

When we remember, finally, that John the Elder of Ephesus was leader of  the Church of Western Asia Minor, we can easily see how well his position suits the tone in which the seven Epistles to the seven Communities in that region are composed in Rev. ii. f. They were certainly not sent separately to each one of those communities, and grouped together only at a later date. The way in which they are all written round the same circle of ideas, and almost modelled on one pattern, indicates far rather that from the very first they were only intended for publication in the book of Revelation. They make a weighty impression precisely because the same turns of expression recur so  continually. They must, therefore, in any case, have been composed by  the last contributor to the book, with the idea of recommending a   definite circle of readers to take due note of the prophecies which follow in iv. 1-xxii. 5.

We must not persist, however, in thinking that it was John the Elder who wrote the seven letters, and in this way, as well as by other embellishments which we can no longer specify exactly, brought the Apocalypse to a close. The description of Jesus tells against this, even if John him self only heard him for a short time. The work may also have been composed by another person in his name, just as well as  the Second and Third Epistles of John. __________________________________________________________________

10. SPIRIT OF THE BOOK.

The seven Epistles in the Apocalypse contain severe words about evil conditions and the opponents of the author in some of the seven communities; but they also contain beautiful and truly religious utterances which are sufficient to compensate for the spirit of the whole book, which is sometimes narrow and vindictive (xvi. 6; xviii. 6  f.), and concentrated upon such external and materialistic matters as   eating, ruling, and white garments (ii. 7, 17; iii. 20 f.; xix. 8,   &c.): "I stand at the door and knock" (iii. 20); "Be thou faithful unto   death, and I will give thee the crown of life" (ii. 10); "hold fast   that which thou hast, that no one take thy crown" (iii. 11). Not a  single prophecy in the book has been fulfilled, and none remains to be   fulfilled, since they are all framed in such a way that they ought to   have been fulfilled within a few years. The main idea, that people should no longer attempt to improve upon the world, but should withdraw from it entirely, and simply wait and hope for a speedy end to it  (especially xxii. 11), is certainly quite out of harmony with the most precious truths which Christianity has brought home to us in the course of centuries, and the fully developed seeds of which were already present in the ideas of Jesus; still, one of the most beautiful products of Christianity, and one which in the end concerns absolutely every individual, consists in that constancy and faithfulness which all the prophecies and admonitions of this book insist upon so forcibly. __________________________________________________________________