the average daily consumption of the workman .... Barley
was largely the food of the poor.” According to the words
just quoted from the Apocalypse, there was to be a dearth of
grain and a superfluity of wine; the price of the wheat was to
be seven times the ordinary, according to Reinach's computation,
and that of the barley four times, This strange
statement suggested some historical allusion, and the discovery
of the allusion was made by Reinach, who points out that
Domitian by an edict in A.D. Q2 prohibited the planting of new
vineyards in Italy, and ordered the reduction of those in the
provinces by one-half. As Asia Minor suffered specially under
this edict, an agitation was set on foot which resulted in the
revocation of the edict. In this revocation the Apocalyptist
saw the menace of a famine of the necessaries of life, while
the luxuries would remain unaffected. From his ascetic standpoint
the revocation of the edict could only pander to drunkenness
and immorality. Reinach's explanation of this ancient
crux interpret um, which has been accepted by Harnack, Bousset,
Porter, Sanday, Swete and others, fixes the earliest date of the
composition of the Apocalypse as A.D. 93. Since Domitian
died in 96, the book was therefore written between A.D. Q3
and 95.
Author.-Before entering on the chief data which help towards the determination of this question, we shall first state the author's standpoint. His book exhibits a Christianity that is-as Harnack (Ency. Brit.9, xx. 498) writes-“free from the law, free from national prejudices, universal and yet a Christianity which is independent of Paul .... The author speaks not at all of the law 1-the word does not occur in his work; he looks for salvation from the power and grace of God and Christ alone nowhere has he made a distinction between Gentile and Jewish Christians .... The author of the Apocalypse has cast aside all national religious prejudices.” The writer is not dependent, consciously or unconsciously, on the Pauline teaching. He has won his Way to universalism, not through the Pauline method, but through one of his own. He has no serious preference for the people of Israel as such, but only for the martyrs and confessors, who shall belong to every tribe and tongue and people and nation (vii. 9 seq.). The unbelieving Jews are “ a synagogue of Satan” (ii. 9).
Yet, on the other hand, our author's attitude to the world reflects the temper of judaism rather than that of Christianity. He looks upon the enemies of the Christian Church with unconcealed hatred. No prayer arises within his work on their behalf, and nothing but unalloyed triumph is displayed over their doom. The Christian duty of love to those that wrong us does not seem to have impressed 'itself on our Apocalyptist.
Is the Apocalypse pseudonymous?-All the Jewish apocalypses are pseudonymous, and all the Christian with the exception of the Shepherd of H ermas. Since our book undoubtedly belongs to this category, the question of its pseudonymity must arise. In the articles on Apocalyptic Literature and Apocryphal Literature (qq.v.) we have shown the large lines of differentiation between apocalyptic and prophecy., The chief ground for resorting to pseudonymous authorship in ludaism was that the belief in prophecy was lost among the people. Hence any writer who would appeal to them was obliged to do so in the name of some great figure of the past. Furthermore, this belief that prophecy had ceased led the religious personalities of the later time to authenticate their message by means of antedated prophecy. They procured confidence in their actual predictions by appealing to the literal fulfilment of such antedated prophecy. In such literature we find the characteristic words or their equivalents: “ Seal up the prophecy: it is not for this generation, ” which are designed to explain the late appearance of the works in which they are found. But this universal characteristic of apocalyptic is almost wholly lacking in the New Testament Apocalypse. The vaticinium ex eventu plays but a very 1 His freedom from legal bondage is as undeniable as his universalism. He lays no further burden on his readers than those required by the Apostolic Decree of Acts xv. 28 seq.
small part in it. Moreover, the chief ground for the development of a pseudonymous literature was absent in the early Christian church. For with the advent of Christianity prophecy had sprung anew into life, and our author distinctly declares that the words of the book are for his own generation (xxii. Io). Hence we conclude that the grounds are lacking which would entitle our assuming a priori that the Apocalypse is pseudonymous. Was the Author the Son of Zebedee, the Apostle?-The evidence of the book is against this assumption. The Writer demands a hearing as a prophet (xxii. 6), and in no single passage makes any claim to having been an apostle. Nay more, the evidence of the text, so far as it goes, is against such a view. He never refers to any previous intercourse with Christ such as we find frequently in the Fourth Gospel, and when he speaks of “ the twelve apostles of the Lamb ” (xxi. 14) he does so in a tone that would seem to exclude him from that body. Here internal and external evidence are at strife; for from the time of justin onwards the Apocalypse was received by the church as 'the work of the Apostle John (see Swete, op. cit.2, p. clxxv). If the writer of the Fourth Gospel was the Apostle John, then the difficulties for the assumption of an apostolic authorship of the Apocalypse become well-nigh insuperable. Nay more, the difficulties attending on the assumption of a common authorship of the Gospel and Apocalypse, independently of the question of the apostolic authorship of the Gospel, are practically insuperable. Some decades ago these difficulties were not insurmountable, when critics assigned a Neronic date to the Apocalypse and a Domitianic or later date to the Gospel. It was from such a. standpoint conceivable that the thoughts and diction of the writer had undergone an entire transformation in the long interval that intervened between the composition of the two books, on the supposition that both were from the same hand. But now that both books are assigned to the last decade of the 1st century A.D. by a growing body of critics, the hypothesis of a common authorship can hardly be sustained. The validity of such an hypothesis was attacked as early as the 4th century by Dionysius of Alexandria in the fragment of his treatise 'lrepi é1ro.7'ye7u§ >1/, in Eusebius, H .E. vii. 24 seq. His arguments, as summed up by Swete (bp. cit., p. cxiv seq.), are as follows: “ John the Evangelist abstains from mentioning his own name, but John the Apocalyptist names himself more than once at the very outset of his book, and again near its end. Doubtless there were many who bore the name of John in the early Christian communities; we read, for instance, of 'John, whose surname was Mark, ' and there may have been a second John in Asia, since at Ephesus, we are told, there were two tombs said to be John's. Again, While the Gospel and the Epistle of John show marks of agreement which suggest a common authorship, the Apocalypse differs widely from both in its ideas and in its way of expressing them; we miss in it the frequent references to 'life, ' ' light, truth, ' ' grace ' and' love 'which are characteristic of the Apostle and find ourselves in a totally different region of thought .... Lastly, the linguistic eccentricities of the Apocalypse bar the way against the acceptance of the book as the work of the Evangelist. The Gospel and the First Epistle are written in correct and fiowing Greek, and there is not a barbarism, a solecism, or a provincialism in them; whereas the Greek of the Apocalypse is inaccurate, disfigured by unusual or foreign words and even at times by solecisms.”-All
subsequent criticism has more or less confirmed the conclusions of Dionysius. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the signs of a relationship between the Apocalypse and the Gospel in the minor peculiarities of language? These, Swete holds, “ create a strong presumption of affinity ” between the two books, while Bousset infers that they “ justify the assumption that the entire circle of johannine writings spring from circles which stood under the influence of the John of Asia Minor.”
We conclude, therefore, that the Gospel and the Apocalypse 2See Bousset, Ojfenbarung Johannisz, pp. 177-179; Swete', pp. cxxv-cxxix.
