Who Wrote Revelation?

Then, going on a little further, he says this about the Revelation of John: “Some before us rejected the book and demolished it entirely. They went through it chapter by chapter finding fault, declaring it unintelligible and illogical, and said that its title was false. [a] For they say it is not John’s, and not even a revelation, since it is so heavily and thickly veiled by its curtain of obscurity. They say that its author was not one of the apostles, nor any of the saints at all, nor anyone belonging to the Church, but Cerinthus, who founded the sect named after him, the Cerinthian, and who wanted to put a name that would be trusted on his own invention. [b] For this, they say, was the doctrine he taught: that the kingdom of Christ will be on earth. Being a lover of the body and altogether fleshly, he dreamed it would consist of the things he himself craved: the filling of the belly and of what lies below the belly, that is, food and drink and marriages, and, to get these under a more respectable name, feasts and sacrifices and the slaughter of victims.

“But I would not dare to reject the book, since many brothers hold it dear. I take the view that it is beyond my own understanding, and I suppose that the meaning of each part is in some way hidden and more wonderful. For even if I do not understand it, I suspect at least that some deeper sense lies in the words. I do not measure and judge them by my own reasoning; I give the larger share to faith, and I have concluded that they are too high for me to grasp. I do not reject what I have not understood; rather, I wonder that I have not seen it as well.”

After this he examines the whole book of Revelation, and shows that it cannot be understood in its surface meaning. Then he continues: “When he has finished practically the whole prophecy, the prophet calls blessed those who keep it, and himself too. For he says, ‘Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book, and I, John, who saw and heard these things.’ [c] So I will not deny that he was called John and that this book is by a John. I agree that it is the work of some holy and inspired man. But I would not easily grant that he was the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, to whom the Gospel titled According to John and the general letter belong. [d] For I judge from the character of each of them, from the kind of language they use, and from the way the book is carried through, that they are not the same man. The evangelist nowhere writes his own name into his work, or announces himself, either in the Gospel or in the letter.”

A little further on he says this again: “John nowhere names himself, neither as speaking of himself nor as speaking of someone else. But the writer of Revelation puts himself forward right at the beginning: ‘The revelation of Jesus Christ, which he gave him to show to his servants quickly; and he made it known by sending it through his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to his testimony, to all that he saw.’ [e] Then he also writes a letter: ‘John, to the seven churches in Asia: grace to you, and peace.’ But the evangelist did not put his name at the head even of the general letter. Without any preamble he began with the mystery of the divine revelation itself: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes.’ It was for such a revelation that the Lord called Peter blessed, saying, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven.’ [f] Nor is John named in the so-called second and third letters of John, short letters though they are; instead it is written, without a name, ‘the elder.’ But this writer did not think it enough to name himself once and then tell what followed. He takes it up again: ‘I, John, your brother and partner in the affliction and the kingdom and the endurance of Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.’ And near the end he said this: ‘Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book, and I, John, who saw and heard these things.’ [g]

“That it is a John who writes these things, then, we must believe, since he says so. But which John this is, is not clear. He did not say, as is often said in the Gospel, that he was the disciple loved by the Lord, or the one who leaned back on his breast, or the brother of James, or the one who had seen and heard the Lord for himself. [i] He would have said one of these things already mentioned if he had wanted to make himself plainly known. But he says none of them. He calls himself our brother and partner, a witness of Jesus, and blessed for having seen and heard the revelations. I think there were many who had the same name as John the apostle, who, out of their love for him, because they admired him and strove to be like him, and wished to be loved by the Lord as he was, gladly took the same name, just as many of the children of believers are named Paul, and Peter too. There is, for example, another John in the Acts of the Apostles, the one called Mark, whom Barnabas and Paul took along with them, and of whom it says again, ‘And they also had John as their helper.’ But whether this is the one who wrote, I would not say. For it is not written that he came with them into Asia. Instead it says, ‘Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia; but John left them and returned to Jerusalem.’ [j] I think it was someone else, one of those who lived in Asia, since they say there are two tombs at Ephesus, and that each is called John’s. [k]

“From the thoughts, too, and from the words and the way they are put together, one may reasonably take this writer to be different from the other. For the Gospel and the letter agree with each other and begin in the same way. The one says, ‘In the beginning was the Word’; the other, ‘That which was from the beginning.’ The one says, ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father’; the other says the same things, slightly changed: ‘That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked at and our hands touched, concerning the Word of life, and the life was revealed.’ [l] He strikes these notes at the very start because, as he made clear in what follows, he is contending against those who said that the Lord had not come in the flesh. That is why he carefully added, ‘And what we have seen we bear witness to, and we declare to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was revealed to us; what we have seen and heard we declare to you also.’ [m] He holds to this and does not stray from his subject, but goes through everything under the same main heads and words, some of which we will briefly point out. Anyone who reads carefully will find in each of them much about ‘life,’ much about ‘light’ and ‘turning away from darkness’; constantly ‘truth,’ ‘grace,’ ‘joy,’ ‘the flesh and the blood of the Lord,’ ‘the judgment,’ ‘the forgiveness of sins,’ ‘the love of God toward us,’ ‘the command to love one another,’ that we must ‘keep all the commands’; the exposing ‘of the world,’ ‘of the devil,’ ‘of the antichrist’; ‘the promise of the Holy Spirit,’ ‘adoption as God’s sons,’ ‘the faith required of us throughout,’ ‘the Father and the Son,’ everywhere. In a word, it is plain to anyone who looks at them all the way through that the Gospel and the letter have one and the same complexion. But Revelation is utterly different from these writings and foreign to them. It does not touch them or come near any of them; it has, one might almost say, not so much as a syllable in common with them. What is more, the letter (to say nothing of the Gospel) has no mention or thought of Revelation, nor does Revelation of the letter. Paul, by contrast, in his letters gave some hint of his revelations too, though he did not write them down by themselves. [n]

“Further, the difference between the Gospel and the letter on the one hand and Revelation on the other can be judged from the style. The former are written not only without slips in the Greek language but with great skill in their wording, their reasoning, and the way their expression is put together. They are very far from containing any foreign-sounding word, any grammatical blunder, or any common, untrained speech at all. For their writer had, it seems, both gifts of speech, since the Lord had granted him both: the gift of knowledge and the gift of expression. That the other writer saw revelations and received knowledge and prophecy I will not deny. But I see that his dialect and language are not accurate Greek. He uses foreign idioms, and in some places makes grammatical blunders. There is no need to pick these out now. I have not said these things to mock him, let no one think so, but only to set out the unlikeness between these writings.”