Curiously only one of the five books in the New Testament attributed to John bears the name of John. Many believers and conservative scholars maintain that the Gospel of John, the first, second and third letters of John, were authored by the apostle John despite the author’s name nowhere appearing in those texts.
It is of course the nature of religious history that people will believe it without necessarily having the kind of source-based authentication that generally historians are looking for. And so there is always a tension between what a religious tradition may say about the past and what the historian may say about the past. (Tom Holland, in John Cleary in conversation with Tom Holland, about 26 mins)
And so it goes. Tradition has assigned the name of John to the Gospel and three letters of the New Testament. Perversely, it may seem, the book that does claim to be written by John is one that critical scholars doubt came from the same pen as anything else attributed to John.
A study of the authorship of the Book of Revelation opens up a number of interesting methodological curiosities of New Testament scholarship. But for most part here I will set out the reasons why critical scholars widely believe the book of Revelation is not from the same author, or even “theological school”, responsible for the Gospel of John.
The Book of Revelation makes unambiguous claims about the identity of its author. It came from God via Jesus Christ who commanded John to write it all down:
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John . . . .
I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet,
Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.
And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks;
And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.
His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire;
And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.
And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.
And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter . . . .
The setting on the isle of Patmos and the identity of an author (or scribe) as a persecuted exile appropriately sets an atmosphere of fear and dread, relieved by a moment of seclusion to be with God alone and to receive his messages uninterrupted. He identifies himself as one of the saints who is being trodden under foot — another motif common to this genre of literature. This is all part of the literary conceit of another Daniel (or any persecuted visionary prophet) being pulled aside by God and struck down to humbly soak up the glories and mysteries of the heavenly realms that would leave lesser mortals dead. The setting is as much atmospherics as are the eyes like fire and the seven headed beast. Yet New Testament scholars will so often be found referring to the author being a persecuted exile on Patmos as if this were a veritable fact of history.
A face-value reading guided by the light of church tradition leads many readers concur with the following:
One may readily suppose that after the Jewish War (66-73/74 CE.) John left Palestine and worked in Asia Minor, as did other Jewish Christians (cf. Eusebius, HE. 3.31.3) (Udo Schelle, The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings, p. 520)
The traditions of the ancient church
The first to identify the John of Revelation with one of the twelve apostles was Justin apparently writing around the 140s:
And further, there was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him, that those who believed in our Christ would dwell a thousand years in Jerusalem; and that thereafter the general, and, in short, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place. (Dialogue with Trypho, 81.4)
Irenaeus, around the 180s, followed:
Now, that the first stage of early life embraces thirty years, and that this extends onwards to the fortieth year, every one will admit; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age, which our Lord possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher, even as the Gospel and all the elders testify; those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, [affirming] that John conveyed to them that information. And he remained among them up to the times of Trajan. Some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but the other apostles also, and heard the very same account from them, and bear testimony as to the [validity of] the statement. (Against Heresies, 2:22.5, proving from the witness of John that Jesus died at age 50)
Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. (Against Heresies, 3.1.2, affirming the apostle John who authored the Gospel lived at Ephesus.)
There are also those who heard from him that John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.” . . . . Then, again, the Church in Ephesus, founded by Paul, and having John remaining among them permanently until the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the tradition of the apostles. (Against Heresies, 3.3.4, affirming the apostle John was based at Ephesus)
Those, moreover, who follow Valentinus, making copious use of that according to John, to illustrate their conjunctions, shall be proved to be totally in error by means of this very Gospel. . . . (Against Heresies, 3.11.7, that the apostle John was author of the Gospel)
Such, then, being the state of the case, and this number being found in all the most approved and ancient copies[of the Apocalypse], and those men who saw John face to face bearing their testimony [to it]; . . . for if it were necessary that his name [of the beast] should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision. For that was seen no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign. (Against Heresies, 5.30.1, 3, that John was the author of Revelation and lived in the time of Domitian)
Tertullian of the Christianity known to north Africa west of Egypt also accepted Revelation as the work of John the apostle.
Presumably on the basis of these surviving works (and the hundred plus years later account of Eusebius) we are to understand that the more or less “proto-orthodox” Western Christianity generally accepted the Book of Revelation as an authentic work of the apostle John by around 200 CE. Others in the east, even in the very region John was said to have been known, claimed the book was composed by John’s arch enemy, Cerinthus.
Thus we read in the History of the Church (6.25) by Eusebius that Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, observed:
1. Afterward [Dionysius] speaks in this manner of the Apocalypse of John.
Some before us have set aside and rejected the book altogether, criticising it chapter by chapter, and pronouncing it without sense or argument, and maintaining that the title is fraudulent.
2. For they say that it is not the work of John, nor is it a revelation, because it is covered thickly and densely by a veil of obscurity. And they affirm that none of the apostles, and none of the saints, nor any one in the Church is its author, but that Cerinthus, who founded the sect which was called after him the Cerinthian, desiring reputable authority for his fiction, prefixed the name.
3. For the doctrine which he taught was this: that the kingdom of Christ will be an earthly one. And as he was himself devoted to the pleasures of the body and altogether sensual in his nature, he dreamed that that kingdom would consist in those things which he desired, namely, in the delights of the belly and of sexual passion; that is to say, in eating and drinking and marrying, and in festivals and sacrifices and the slaying of victims, under the guise of which he thought he could indulge his appetites with a better grace.
A sect in Asia Minor Epiphanius called the Alogi or Alogians are said to have attributed both the Gospel and the Apocalypse to the gnostic Cerinthus, not the apostle John.
The testimony of the book itself
Revelation itself refers to the apostles as figures of the past who are unrelated to the author who is presented as a prophetic scribe:
Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. (18:20)
And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. (21:14)
Udo Schnelle questions the likelihood of a man in his 90s (as John the apostle would have been at the time of the apparent writing of the book) producing such a “powerful writing”.
We have accounts of another John known as the “elder” or “presbyter” in Asia Minor at this time. (These come from Eusebius who appears to be relying on writings of a certain Papias.) Though some (including Eusebius) have attributed the Book of Revelation to this John, again the witness of the book itself counts against this. The title of “elder” indicated a church teacher, not a prophet, and the ostensible author of Revelation was a prophet. He at no time suggests he was an elder. Indeed, elders, for him, are twenty-four angelic beings in heaven who are by no means modelled on any earthly office of presbyters.
Could the author(s) of the Gospel and Epistles of John have written Revelation?
There are certain thematic points of contact between Revelation and the other “Johannine” literature.
Living water
Revelation 7:16-17; 21:6; 22:1, 17
Jesus Christ = The Word of God
Jesus Christ = The Lamb of God
Revelation about 30 times — τὸ ἀρνίον
John 1:29, 36 — ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ (a different word from that used in Revelation)
Theme of Conquering, Victory
Motif of witness/testimony
13 times in Revelation
64 times in the Johannine writings
Further, we have the word ὄψις (face) being found only in Revelation and 1 John; and σφάζω (slay, kill) unique to 1 John 3:12 and Revelation passages.
But don’t get too excited by these common terms and themes, warns Udo Schnelle:
These lines of contact do not permit certain conclusions concerning the relationship of the documents themselves, however, since both the purely linguistic statistics and the common motifs, when examined individually, manifest either theological concepts that differ widely from each other, or the agreements may be attributed to derivation from a comparable stock of traditions in their respective backgrounds. (p. 521)
J. Frey, for example, would reverse the direction of borrowing and argue that the Fourth Gospel, being “more developed”, draws upon an earlier (less sophisticated) writing, the Revelation.
The theme of victory or conquering is quite different. In the Johannine literature it denotes
the victory of faith in Christ as the (already accomplished) overcoming of the world. By contrast, in Revelation the dominant idea associated with the term is the struggle and victory of the Lamb . . . or the preservation of Christians in the world as the place of struggle. . . .
The witness theme is also quite different. In the Gospels and letters it references the person of Jesus; in Revelation it is what is seen in a vision.
Differences in Language
Again I cite Udo Schnelle:
The semitizing Greek of Revelation has been considered a compelling argument against the thesis that Revelation and the Fourth Gospel were written by the same author since the time of W. Bousset and R. H. Charles. (p. 522)
Specific semitisms listed:
- Neglecting the correspondence of cases (cf Rev. 1:5, 2:13, 20; 3:12; 4:1; 5:11-12; 11:15, et al.)
- Introducing sentences with και (= and, also, even) analogous to w-consecutive (cf. Rev. 3:20; 6:12; 10:7; 14:9-10)
- The tenses are used with great freedom, so that e.g. past, present, and future can stand in the same sentence, even though they all refer to the same time (cf. Rev. 4:9-11; 6:15-17; 11; 14:2-3; 16:21; 20:7-8)
- The substitution of a finite verb by an infinitive (cf. Rev. 12:7; 13:10) or a participial clause (cf. Rev. 10:2; 12:2; 19:12; 21:12, 14)
- Unusual use of prepositions (e.g. ἐπί, upon)
Differences in Christology
At the center of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel and the Letters of John stands the concept of the incarnation. It is based on the essential unity of Father and Son, so that the incarnate one is none other than the pre-existent and exalted one . . . . In contrast, in Revelation the Lamb, i,e, the Son, is clearly subordinate to God (cf. e.g. Rev. 3:5; 5:6-7, 13; 6:16; 7:10; 14:14; 15:3; 20:11-15). It is not the incarnation of the Son of God (υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ only in Rev. 2:18), but the idea of the installation of Christ as Lord of the world and history that determines the Christology of Revelation. (p. 522)
Differences in Ecclesiology
Already in the messages to the seven churches the dominance of ecclesiology is signaled (ἐκκλησία [church] in Revelation 15x in chapters 2-3). The seer John struggles against an accommodation of the church to the political ideology of his time. For him the key issue is the right relationship between church and society, which finds its expression in the vision of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21). These determinative universal components are lacking in the Fourth Gospel and in the Johannine letters. There state and society come into view only in rudimentary ways or not at all. (pp. 522-23)
Differences in Eschatology
Little needs to be said here. One of the first differences that confronts most readers is that Revelation is about the future, the coming judgment upon the world where a new city and new age will be established. The Gospel of John, of course, appears to be straining to argue against an apocalyptic Jesus with its emphasis on Jesus having already come and having brought salvation to all those who receive him.
He which testifieth these things
For such reasons I believe most critical scholars are unable to accept common authorship of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel.
It is beyond the scope of this post to examine the character of Revelation itself, so let’s just mention in passing that some scholars see evidence in this work that it originated as a Jewish (non-Christian) writing that was redacted for Christian purposes. J. Frey is one scholar who has suggested that the name of John in this work is itself part of this later redactional effort (Frey, Jõrg. ‘Erwägungen zum Verhaltinis der Johannesapokalypse zu den übrigen Schriften des Corpus Johanneum,’ in Die johanneische Frage, ed. Martin Hengel, WUNT, 67. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993 326-429.)
Some have suggested that there were two independent Johannine schools (Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. ‘The Quest for the Johannine School: The Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel,’ NTS 23 (1977) 410-418)
Neil Godfrey
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Thank you very much for that explanation. There is certainly much to look into regarding the authorship of the books traditionally attributed to John. And I am no fan of any opinion from Eusebius now, generally speaking. So whatever he may have offered on the topic of the authorship of Revelation we may need to take with two grains of salt instead of one, is my feeling now, though he apparently had certain gifts that quite a few must have liked during his time.
My impression so far follows what you laid out on the continuing themes or threads through the Gospel of John, John’s epistles, and Revelation, even though as you indicated, different people may have written Revelation and John while drawing from a similar theological milieu. And I have found at least one more theme running through those, which is a particularly important one to me anyway, which I see as critical to what must have been ongoing early Christian debate—John’s emphasis with regard to following the commandments of God [to which I would ask John were he here: Which ones? Meanwhile I do not think he was a Judaizer]… comparing that emphasis by John of obeying God’s commands as evidence of people being real Christians to what I have for many years called (and many years going way back to when I was a Christian) Paul’s idiom about salvation being not of “works,” which Paul himself contradicts in Romans 2:6-8… which, by the way, no other New Testament author ever reinforces [which theological problem, by the way, contributes a bit to a thoughtful Christian deconverting]. Moreover, I have a a bad habit of starting sentences with and a little too often as well, much like the author of Revelation (which is overused in the Seventy Weeks Prophecy also), which seemingly bad habit I think I can explain, however, since being very pragmatic is my nature [my not being as aesthetic, which contributes to my constant use of parentheses and brackets], writing to me is an attempt to get a certain job done which very often includes continually pointing readers back to what they have just read while proceeding, in a hope that they will keep the line of thought going in the way I do when writing it down. So I’m fairly sympathetic to Bible authors who had that habit even though it’s not considered proper and certainly isn’t like Shakespeare.
Regarding a mixture of tenses, I sympathize with that too, since the subject matter of Revelation is far more ambitious than the Gospel of John, in my opinion. To see what the book’s author was hoping to accomplish, one must go back into the Jewish prophets concerning things like “candlesticks” (in Zechariah), the destruction of Babylon (in Isaiah and Jeremiah), also a bit elusively to the “seven churches” which the author of Revelation was, in my opinion, trying to show how Isaiah 4:1 was an allusion to seven churches instead of what it indicated at face value—polygamy—with mention of the seven churches used in Revelation to solve an embarrassing problem for the Christian movement: that the Messiah might need to be or have been a polygamist who would take seven wives. Babylon’s destruction problem I see as very similar since that didn’t come off as predicted by those two “authoritative” books for the Christian faith—again, Isaiah and Jeremiah—which must have been seen as a big problem in the view of some Christian leaders since Jesus was supposedly authorized to be their Messiah by coming according to those very same scriptures [check this example of a huge theme throughout the New Testament, Acts 26:22, about the importance of fulfilled prophecy to the movement]… which scriptures, however, had non-believing Jews who were meanwhile maintaining Isaiah and Jeremiah in their extant first-century forms which prevented Christians from fudging those to remove those type of underlying problems to their religious enterprise.
Anyway, I see Revelation as a very ad hoc patch-up job for proto-orthodox Christian theology and think using those mix of tenses, as referred to above, was seen as theologically implied by the present, past, and future running together in Christian theology, in view of its important predestination tenet that says everything was “finished” before “the foundation of the world” (Hebrews 4:3b), which Christian ideas would allow wholesale mixing of tenses. I think it’s the nature of what Revelation was trying to accomplish for the Christian faith, which is so ambitious, leads to it being given such underrated status. But don’t get me wrong: I consider it nothing but deception, while the person who wrote it I see as having been a very Machiavellian human being, or else stuck to pursuing this by one decision he made that he could not reverse for the rest of his life—someone who also knew a great number of those crazy Jewish prophecies quite well… which may not have been John but someone helping him on his old age perhaps. I have been wondering if he could have been 79 or 80 when that book was produced.
Hi Doug,
As for the mix of tenses indicating a running together of present, past and future — I have since added a link to those instances in Revelation where the tenses are mixed, and one can see that it really is a grammatical quirk and not about past-present-future coming together in some theological sense.
You are probably aware of the suggestions that Revelation takes a swipe at Paul’s views in the letters to the seven churches. On the other hand, Paul-Louis Couchoud addressed the other side of the conflict by noting how Paul’s writings take a swipe at the Christology found in Revelation: The Christ of John’s Revelation — Nemesis of Paul’s crucified Christ.
And on top of all this, there are new ideas (new for me) I want to follow up about the paraclete (comforter) in the Gospel of John being interpreted as Paul among early Christians: see the FRDB discussion (between Huller, Doherty and Parvus) on pages 4 and 5 of the thread About Doherty’s Sacrifice in Heaven.
Revelation is one of those books where one would have to already know the interpretation in order to interpret it. Jerusalem has been destroyed and the kingdom of Israel is no longer the kingdom of God – now, the kingdom of God belongs to the Christian Church. That’s its message and all the rest of the gobblety goop is made to mystify the reader,.
I am looking for a post where you might talk in some detail about the first chapter of Revelation, but I don’t see one yet, so I’ll just put this here.
While scholars widely acknowledge the explicit references to death, resurrection, and life in the first chapter, the passage additionally contains other subtle and implicit references that I’ve not seen any published commentaries even mention. (I think there are about 20 such references in total.) These many allusions to death and life should guide how we interpret the details of the vision in verses 12-16.
That vision almost certainly intends to be dynamic, an unfolding event wherein the figure glows brighter and brighter with each subsequent visual description. One would be mistaken to view it as a mere snapshot of simply how the figure looks at a particular instant in time. Note that many English versions contain a mistranslation like, “bronze refined in a furnace,” which can mislead the reader into imagining cooled bronze, a mistake which obscures the progression; certainly the Greek refers to molten bronze glowing bright white. Also, the “sword coming out of his mouth” recalls the “pierced” in Rev 1:7. Thus, it possibly refers to the extraction of a sword from a corpse, and not merely to a sword being held in the mouth. “Sound like many waters” likely refers not to speech, but to the noise of regenerative energy flowing into the body. Later in Revelation, water symbolizes life.
From these and many other observations (far too much to list in a short comment here), I have become convinced that the vision is best thought of as a resurrection account (although it might also describe apotheosis, as resurrection and apotheosis are closely related concepts).
One can say so much more about the first chapter. Although scholars widely recognize its dependence on the Hebrew Bible, I still think the exact nature of how Revelation reworks its source material needs better exposition with more attention to minute details.
I am looking for knowledgeable people with whom I can discuss this passage in rigorous detail. If my thesis doesn’t convince you, I’d like to hear just what you think is wrong with my arguments. If I am right that prior scholarship has missed something very important in this chapter, I want to encourage authors of new or updated commentaries on Revelation to address it.
I had thought there might be something on Rev 1 in my Revelation archive but if there is I see now it would not have been easy to find. So posting it here is fine, thanks.
I think I can see your point but you will be the judge of that. I think you are right to focus on the distinctive — “a-human” — features of the passage.
My own take is that this image of Jesus, one “like” a son of man as per Daniel’s heavenly figure (a “man-like” figure in/of Heaven) can be understood a little better by examining Zechariah 12:10. Yes, you are correct in that the piercing presupposes a sword (not a spear as per the Gospel of John) and the sword coming out of his mouth is an interesting allusion, but it comes out to destroy so it is coming out of a living being, not from or through a corpse.
Have you studied the various interpretations of Zechariah 12:10? It is quite reasonable to interpret Zechariah 12:10 as imagining a metaphorical piercing of God or a divine figure through the treatment of his prophets on earth. The technical expression “look upon him …” is a phrase that is thought to lend this interpretation not unlikely – but more to the point it is Yahweh speaking about himself, if read at face value, in Zechariah. So already in the OT it is conceivable of a Yahweh being in some way pierced — certainly not literally on earth.
If so, and if we match this with the Danielic heavenly son-of-man-Like figure, and if we remove from our heads all gospel preconceptions, I think it is not unlikely that the author was imagining a Jesus who was, who was dead and is now alive entirely in a heavenly realm — like the lamb slain before the heavenly altar.
The entire image of Jesus here is of a heavenly figure with no association with any human trappings at all, except in appearance and his Danielic vicarious suffering with the old Israel.
Jesus is the one who was (in heaven/as a heavenly figure) and who was not/died (in heaven/as a heavenly figure) and now is (in heaven/as a heavenly figure).
His appearance to John is a kind of proleptic fulfilment of the Zech 12:10 prophecy — so I think your point about the ever increasing glory of the description in verses 12-16 is most interesting and apt. (Tho it does say, does it not, that it was his voice that was the sound of a rushing waters?)
So yes I agree with you that it does depict a resurrection figure though not a resurrection from a literally flesh and blood earthly corpse. The exclusive focus on the heavenly and increasingly glorifying/coming figure does not hint at that kind of origin.
I may not omitted addressing some of your nuance, though. If so, press me further.
You are absolutely correct that Zechariah 12:10-14 is crucially important here. It’s about mourning over the dead (whomever that includes). That’s a big part of my fuller argument that I sent you privately.
This passage itself never implies the figure uses the sword as a weapon; it merely says the a sharp double-edged sword was departing (the same Greek word often used for people exiting a city) out of his mouth. Be careful, since mention of the sword elsewhere in Revelation could be written by a different author making a quite different point, but even a single author could be contrasting two separate functions of the sword. For now, looking closely only at Revelation 1 itself in the Greek, the most straightforward and natural explanation of the sword is that it is being extracted from someone it had pierced. This is the plain reading.
English translations aren’t always as helpful as we might like. For example, “like burnished bronze refined in a furnace,” is certainly wrong; it has to be white-hot molten bronze that is meant.
Another translation issue is that ancient Greek uses the same word, phonos, both for voices and for other kinds of sounds. One has to determine the meaning from context. It has been controversial among scholars whether the sound like many waters should be identified with the previous voice like a trumpet. I argue, partially based on the striking parallel to Daniel 7:11 (where when Daniel turns around intending to hear the beast continue speaking, but instead finds it being slain, and hears another speaking), that these are two different sounds. Here the later sound’s position alongside the visual description is very well explained as referring to the noise of whatever process causes the increasing glowing.
John falling down “as if dead” in ironic contract to the figure’s restoration is yet another clue. Then soon after, the figure explicitly says, “I was dead, but you see I’m alive”.
Seriously, the most compelling reading of Rev 1:12-16 is as a vision of a full blown resurrection. It is not a mere revelatory appearance. (It is a separate question whether John supposedly witnesses the resurrection the same time it happens, or whether the vision means to be some sort of flashback or flashforward.) It greatly disappoints me how scholarly commentaries (every one I’ve checked) have all missed this.
You said to press you further.
If you are asking me to comment on the idea of the sword being extracted through a mouth, I have to say I find that hard to imagine, sorry. Swords have hilts and once they pierce a body I expect they would be extracted by pulling them back out back from they way they went in.
I’m not sure I fully understand your point about “a vision of a full blown resurrection”. Certainly I agree that the vision is of the resurrected Jesus.
I don’t think you’ve grasped the weight of my argument yet. Have you read the draft article I sent you privately over Facebook messenger? I really really really want your opinion on it, and advice for how I can better rewrite it.
Please don’t get too hung up on the sword bit, it was never the main thrust of my argument, and still we have many other details to discuss. But, that said, I do need to clarify more about the sword.
I find it crucial to notice how the sword functions to link verses 12-18 back to verse 7, where the tribes on earth below mourn the figure’s death in reaction to seeing him pierced. (They are not mourning “for themselves” as, for example, R. H. Charles’s commentary implausibly suggests.) But let’s set that aside for now. I’d like to discuss verse 7 more with you later, but I think it’s better to deal with verses 12-18 first.
Mouths are a recurring theme used repeatedly in the book of Revelation; it occurs at least eighteen times in the book. A prime example is Rev 16:13, “And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs.” It should be noted that in these parallel passages something is being either swallowed by or ejected out of a mouth. Contrary to how the sword is often mistakenly depicted in Christian art, we have reasons to think that Rev Rev 1:16 intends to depict the sword likewise being EJECTED from the mouth, not simply held there. (Rev 19:15, 21 will require their own separate discussion.)
What do you think is the literary purpose of the sword ejection Rev 1:16? It really seems to me that the only sufficient explanation is that the scene truly means to describe a the figure being restored to life before John’s visionary eyes. The more traditional assumption that the scene describes a mere appearance of a figure who had already been restored to live some unspecified time before utterly fails to account for why the sword is ejected at that point in the scene.
Next, I’d like to soom discuss other things about the passage other than the sword.
For example, what do you think the purpose of Rev 1:12’s explicit allusion to Dan 7:11? Daniel turns with the intention of seeing the beast continue speaking, but instead finds the beast dead. Do you understand why I think this allusion was intended to function as an indicator that John likewise sees a dead figure when he turns around?
You will have to forgive me, sorry — but I do not see the link between Rev 1:12 and Dan 7:11. From what I can see the Daniel passage merely describes Daniel looking on until the beast was slain — rather than turning to see, unexpectedly, that it had been slain.
Further — and again I fear I will not meet with your approval on this point — I do not see how the implied author in Revelation can be understood to be seeing, at first, a corpse at first look, a corpse that is said to be resurrected step by step.
When one declares that one saw “X” in certain clothing, one does not default to imagining they are describing their view of a corpse unless they explicitly say it is a cadaver. When one speaks of seeing someone who is speaking to you but at the same time who was beaten, or cut and wounded, or shot or stabbed, my view is that one thinks of a living person who somehow has emerged from any otherwise fatal injury.
The Zechariah passage has been understood, in the minds of some interpreters, as a reference to a living being who was once slain, even if only vicariously. That is, as a vision of God who was “pierced” or “slain” by virtue of his prophets having been so mistreated.
(Further, I do think that “sword” is a known metaphor for words that pierce.)
Rev 1:12 mentions turning twice. John’s starts to turn because of hearing a sound, then the text somewhat redundantly again mentions him having turned: “Then I TURNED around looking for the VOICE that had been speaking to me, and ONCE TURNED, I saw …”
The redundancy is explained by the similar redundancy in Daniel. Daniel 7:11 mentions looking twice, and it likewise sandwiches the prophet hearing a sound. “I LOOKED then because of the SOUND of the great words that the horn was speaking. And AS I LOOKED, the beast was killed, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.”
This is as close of a literary allusion as any other we find in Revelation, and it comes from a portion of Daniel we know for sure the author of Revelation is working from. Surely you can agree that these two verses are clearly intentional parallels, even if you disagree with me about what, if anything, the parallel implies.
The two verses do point to a common style of expression for visions and yes, the author of Revelation evidently knew the book of Daniel and alluded to it in this passage. The problem I have is that John hears a voice and he turns to see who it is that is speaking and then sees a supernatural figure who reminds him of one called the “son of man” in Daniel. All of that — beginning with hearing a voice — leads me to understand that the speaker is alive and looks more like Daniel’s son of man (the reader thinks of a living and upright son of man in Daniel) than a dead body that does not literally speak.
“unless they explicitly say it is a cadaver.”
Yeah, about that, I have two things to say.
First, explicit doesn’t work well in an apocalyptic text that is trying to present an aura of mystery and force the reader to have to follow subtle hints to understand the deeper meaning. (Consider if someone similarly objected that had John really meant for 666 to refer to Nero, he would have needed to say so explicitly. I don’t think either of us would give that objection much weight.) One method John (and other NT authors) use to hint at things is by making allusions to OT passages where those things are more clearly said. (R. G. Price’s book Deciphering the Gospels talks about how Mark uses this technique.)
Second, one of the verses of Daniel used by the author of Revelation 1:12-16 says cadaver!!!
It’s the Hebrew word (גְּוִיָּה or geviyah), found in Dan 10:6. While sometimes in Hebrew גְּוִיָּה is used to refer to living bodies, it is the term used in Hebrew for referring to a cadaver. André LaCocque thought this interesting enough to be worth mentioning in his commentary, The Book of Daniel. Moreover this is one of the main verses from Daniel that the author of Revelation 1:12-16 indisputably references while making creative modifications to it! For example, the change from Daniel 10:6’s “the sound of a multitude” to Revelation 1:15’s “sound of many waters” (a phrase found not in Daniel, but twice in Ezekiel), appears expressly motivated by the idea that water symbolizes life.
The meaning and intended symbolism of what is seen is certainly often debatable, certainly, but what is seen is usually clear enough, is it not?
(I’m not sure why the blog lets me reply to certain comments and not others. I’m not sure if this will appear in the correct place in the comment thread.)
I do think you’ve correctly identified the biggest difficulty for my thesis, but I don’t think it’s fatal.
I am not convinced all the lines of speech in Revelation 1 are necessarily meant to be from the same speaker. In 1:8-11, a voice, maybe God, maybe an angel, speaks. In v15 we just have a sound of a process happening. It’s not until 1:17 that the risen figure himself speaks. But also, I worry the text may be complicated by interpolation into one or both of the speeches.
Allow me to go on a quick tangent and use another completely different text as an example of how we should approach problems. In Genesis 32:22-32 we have a passage that Jacob wrestles with someone. Multiple facts point to that someone being Esau, in particular the abundant parallels to Genesis 27. Yet, the text in Genesis 32 also includes other indicators that Jacob is wrestling with God himself. I won’t go into details here, as my point is to ask you about methodology. How should we deal with passages where most of the evidence points in a particular direction, but one or two anomalous details don’t fit. For the passage in Genesis 32, the “he wrestled with an angel” explanation seems to be the least insightful explanation, as it neither fits with the evidence indicating he wrestled with his twin, while likewise also failing to fit with the explicit statement (Gen 32:30) that he saw and wrested directly with God. (It does, though, fit other mentions of angels in the broader surrounding context.) A better explanation is to accept that the text is not univocal, but has passed through multiple hands before coming down to us; some scribe didn’t like an older version where Esau actually got his blessing back.
Returning back to Revelation 1, again I don’t think we should ignore the direction in which the majority of the details in a passage point just because some other detail or two seems anomalous and may point in a conflicting direction. We need to first try to catalog and weigh all the evidence without brushing any of it aside, and then afterwards try to explain why it may not all seem to point in the same direction. I could still use help with this process.
That question of ambiguity in the Old Testament is timely for me. I have just completed reading a large section of Principles of Samaritan Halachah (with Bóid as a co-author) where it is demonstrated that narratives and edicts of the Pentateuch were put together often in a manner that was deliberately ambiguous. The reason for this was that the compilers of the stories were seeking to produce a work that a wide range of “schools of thought” could accept — both from within Samaritan and Judean traditions, each of which had their own partisan groups. Bóid and his coauthor explain the evidence for this being intentional so that different groups could all read the same text in the way that they considered authoritative while disagreeing with each other. I want to set out their case in a future post. I mentioned the name of one of the authors for a reason that you may recognize: In earlywritings forum Stephan Huller regularly boasts that the same Bóid is is “friend” and “teacher” of Samaritan studies, while at the same time pouring scorn on Russell Gmirkin’s thesis for supposedly “ignoring the Samaritan” contribution to the Pentateuch. Bóid’s argument directly supports Russell Gmirkin’s model for how the Pentateuch was created. I hate to imagine how SH (SA) would react to that!
Unfortunately the setup only allows comments to be threaded in so many steps. The best way out I think is to quote part of the comment one is replying to.
The parallel to Rev 1:7 in Matthew 23:30 is misleading and should not be allowed to limit or overly influence how we are read Revelation. We might instead consider if Rev 1:7 means to depict an angel falling out of the sky after being killed by other powers there. This would create an interesting parallel with Rev 9:1, and later with the slaying of the dragon.
For what it’s worth, my memory was recently jogged when I came across Isaiah 49:2 where we read of Yahweh’s servant having his mouth made like a sharp sword. I know that’s not the same as having a sword come out of one’s mouth, but some may think the image suggests a similar metaphorical use in Revelation.