- ber the Apostle John among the martyrs." [Haenlein's Einleitung in das N. T. vol.
III. chap. vi. § 1, p. 168.] The fact is, that not only these two, but several other Fathers, use the term in application to John, and they all do it without any implication of an actual, fatal martyrdom; as may be seen by a reference to Suicer, sub voce.
So little reverence have the critical, even among the Romanists, for any of these old stories about John's adventures, that the sagacious Abbot Facditius (quoted by Lampe) quite turns these matters into a jest. Coupling this story with the one about John's chaste celibacy, (as supported by the monachists,) he says, in reference to the latter, that if John made out to preserve his chastity uncontaminated among such a people as the Jews were, in that most corrupt age, he should consider it a greater miracle than if John had come safe out of the kettle of boiling oil; but on the reverend Abbot's sentiment, perhaps many will remark with Lampe,—"quod pronuntiatum tamen nimis audax est."—"It is rather too bold to pronounce such an opinion." Nevertheless, such a termination of life would be so much in accordance with the standard mode of dispatching an apostle, that they would never have taken him out of the oil-kettle, except for the necessity of sending him to Patmos, and dragging him on through multitudes of odd adventures yet to come. So we might then have had the satisfaction of winding up his story, in the literal and happy application of the words of a certain venerable poetical formula for the conclusion of a nursery tale, which here makes not only rhyme but reason,—
HIS BANISHMENT.
This fable of his journey to Rome is by all its propagators connected with the well-authorized incident of his banishment to Patmos. This event, given on the high evidence of the Revelation which bears his name, is by all the best and most ancient authorities, referred to the period of the reign of Domitian. The precise year is as much beyond any means of investigation, as most other exact dates in his and all the other apostles' history. From the terms in which the ancient writers commemorate the event, it is known, with tolerable certainty, to have occurred towards the close of the reign of Domitian, though none of the early Fathers specify the year. The first who pretend to fix the date, refer it to the fourteenth year of that emperor, and the most critical among the moderns fix it as late; and some even in the fifteenth or last year of his reign; since that persecution of the Christians, during which John seems to have been banished, may be fairly presumed, from the known circumstances as recorded in history, to have been the last great series of tyrannical acts committed by this remarkably wicked monarch. It certainly appears, from distinct assertions in the credible records of ecclesiastical history, that there was a great persecution begun about this time by Domitian, against the Christians; but there is no reasonable doubt that the extent and vindictiveness of it has been very much overrated, in the rage among the later Fathers, for multiplying the sufferings of the early Christians far beyond the truth. The first Christian writers who allude to this persecution very partic-
