Art. 10.-THE BOOK OF REVELATION.

A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St John. By R. H. Charles, D.D. Two vols. T. & T. Clark, 1920.

THERE is, perhaps, no book of the Bible on which modern study has cast more light than the last, the Revelation of St John. If we imagine an intelligent reader without previous knowledge working through the New Testament till he came to this, he would at once realise that he had passed to a type of literature very different from the Gospels and Epistles. He would find in these things hard to be understood, perhaps things hard to be believed; but he would have no insuperable difficulty in grasping their general principles. In Revelation, however, he would find himself in a different world-a series of bizarre pictures, purporting to have been revealed to the writer as ecstatic visions and to describe events leading up to the end of the world. If he had read the Old Testament, he might be reminded of similar features in Daniel and Zechariah, and would be inclined at times to recall half-remembered fragments of modern theosophical literature or of automatic writing. Questioning whether what he read could really be intended as literal, he might try to apply the key of allegory. But he would not get far before he abandoned the attempt in despair. And this is just what most readers of Revelation have done. They feel sure that attempts to extract from these visions an esoteric forecast of history, whether secular or ecclesiastical, are fundamentally unscientific; they content themselves with a florilegium of passages, such as the picture of the redeemed before the throne, which can be appropriated at once on account of the directness of their emotional appeal, apart from the context or their original significance.

There is, however, a key which does actually fit the lock; but it is like one of those patent safe-keys which require the knowledge and application of a complicated code word or phrase; for even with the key, the Revelation as a whole can never be a book for him who runs to read. The code word is Apocalyptic.' As we have already remarked, the prima facie impression as we pass

to this book is that we are dealing with a special type of literature; and modern scholarship confirms this impression. From 200 B.C. onwards, Judaism produced a series of such books, visions of the future and of the end (always regarded as near), clothed in symbolical language, attributed to some great name of the past, and having as their main theme the triumph of the cause of God by a series of catastrophic interventions which were to bring the world's history to a close and usher in a final golden age. Though the Jew often thought his country wrong, he never thought that every country except his own was right; he identified the cause of God with that of his nation, or at least of that part of it with which he found himself in agreement.

It will be seen that this would serve as a general description of Revelation, with the important differences that it is ascribed not to a figure of the dim past, but to a 'John' who is still alive, and that the Christian Church takes the place of the Jewish nation. Of other Apocalypses many have come down to us, usually in translations; but they were little known or studied until recently. The study of them is associated with the name of Dr Charles, now Archdeacon of Westminster. He has won a worldwide reputation as the pioneer and leading authority in this literature; and it is in every way fitting that in the book before us he should crown his work with a standard edition of the great Christian Apocalypse.

This edition is the fruit of twenty-five years of study. Whether all his conclusions will be finally accepted in detail or not, it will remain undoubtedly the standard edition for years to come. The many-sided learning, embracing Apocalyptic and other contemporary writings, the accurate and painstaking elaboration of linguistic and textual details, the sympathetic literary and religious insight, combine to make it an example that enables English scholarship to speak without fear or apology with its adversaries in the gate. It has all the qualities which have been popularly associated with the best German scholars, and, while Dr Charles knows and has used anything of value which has come from them, he is original, firsthand, and independent. We may illustrate from the elaborate section of forty pages on the Grammar of the Apocalypse. In this, Dr Charles investigates the

usages of words, phrases, tenses, and so on, comparing them with corresponding usages in the other Johannine books. Of the conclusions drawn we shall speak later; at the moment we are concerned with the labour involved. Such results are not to be gathered in a few minutes from dictionaries or concordances; they can only come from repeated re-readings of the documents with a single eye to each particular feature which is the subject of investigation. And often the work is complicated by intricate textual questions as to the correct reading.

What, then, are the results? Our first questions relate to authorship and date. The Christian Apocalypse, unlike others, is not pseudonymous. It claims to be by one 'John,' and Dr Charles urges strongly and rightly that we must accept the claim. But who was this John? Here we enter upon one of the most disputed and complex questions, a question which affects not only the Apocalypse but the other co-called Johannine writings of the New Testament, the Gospel and the three Epistles. A full discussion of this question is not possible here; but it may be useful to give the reader some idea of the situation. It is not a case where criticism interferes arbitrarily to upset an unequivocal claim made by our documents or the consistent evidence of early tradition.

Briefly, the data on which criticism has to work are these: none of these books claim to be written by the Apostle, the son of Zebedee. The Apocalyptist describes himself as 'your brother and partaker with you in tribulation'; he speaks of himself as a prophet, and of the apostles as a separate body. The second and third Epistles are by an unknown Presbyter or Elder; the first Epistle is anonymous; the Gospel is apparently by an unnamed 'disciple whom Jesus loved.' From the end of the second century all these were ascribed, with some hesitation as to the Apocalypse, to John, the son of Zebedee. But in earlier Christian literature the case is not so clear. There is evidence of at least two Johns at Ephesus. In a well-known passage, quoted by Eusebius, Papias speaks in the same sentence of a John who figures in a list of apostles, and also of an 'elder' John, who is coupled with Aristion. Eusebius accepts the statement and says that it is confirmed by

the existence in his own time of two tombs in Ephesus bearing the name of John. While, then, there is general agreement that the Gospel and, generally, the other Johannine literature were written by a John of Ephesus, there is considerable hesitation in identifying him sans phrase with the apostle, the son of Zebedee, who figures in the Gospels. Even Irenæus, though he implies the identification, always calls John the disciple of the Lord, or some such name; never 'the Apostle,' or the son of Zebedee.

There is, further, some evidence that the apostle was martyred by the Jews, almost certainly before 70,* in which case he cannot be the aged John whom we hear of at Ephesus, or the author of any of the books in question, since these date from the end of the first century A.D. This evidence of martyrdom, which is certainly slight, is usually brushed aside altogether; but Dr Charles lays weight upon it, the point being that once the Ephesian John had been identified with the apostle, as was the case by the close of the second century, the contradictory evidence of martyrdom would disappear.

Further, on internal grounds, it is difficult to ascribe all the Johannine books to the same writer. Ideas, style, and language make it difficult, in spite of some points of contact, to believe that the Apocalypse and the Gospel come from the same hand. We may note especially the difference found in the attitude towards eschatology. In the Gospel the coming of Christ and the Judgment are spiritualised; they have already taken place in the experience of the believing soul. In the Apocalypse the eschatology is consistently regarded under its popular and external aspects; a literal and immediate judgment

The references to the date of Galatians on pp. xlix f. are not very clear. The Epistle cannot be dated as late as 64 A.D., and in any case the important point is the reference to John the Apostle in ch. ii as indicating that he was alive at the time of the events there described, i.e. at the Council of Jerusalem in 49 A.D., or more probably at an earlier conference. In other words, so far as the evidence of Galatians goes, John may have been martyred, if he was martyred, any time after 50 A.D. This does not, however, affect Dr Charles' general position.

†The question of the date of the Apocalypse is complicated; but Dr Charles agrees both with the earliest external evidence and with the conclusions of most modern scholars in placing it in the last years of Domitian's reign.

and end of the world are expected. All this was seen by Dionysius of Alexandria, who died A.D. 265, and is widely recognised. But Dr Charles, by his investigation of the language and usages of the different books, has made the difference of authorship almost indisputable; in particular he has shown conclusively that the theory which attributes the second and third Epistles to the writer of the Apocalypse is impossible. His view is that the Gospel and the three Epistles belong together and come from the Presbyter; while the Apocalypse is by an otherwise unknown John, a prophet who migrated late in life from Galilee, the home of Apocalyptic, to Ephesus. All the books, therefore, come from the same school; and this fact sufficiently explains the linguistic and theological agreements between them. Dr Charles, then, agrees with the majority of modern critics in separating the books; he differs from the right wing in assigning neither to the Apostle, whom he regards as having suffered an early martyrdom.

In other respects he is by no means an adherent of the left wing. There are inconsistencies, repetitions, and varying points of view in the Apocalypse which have suggested to many critics that the work, as we have it, is a combination of sources of various dates, some Jewish, some Christian, some originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, others in Greek. And on this basis the fascinating game of disentangling the sources has gone on merrily; but with no very convincing result. Dr Charles disagrees with this method, and his main reason is derived from the meticulous analysis of language and style already referred to. This shows that, with a few exceptions, the book is a real unity, and represents, as it stands, the mind of the author, not of an editor who has pieced together disjointed and half-understood fragments.

This matter of style is very important and significant, because the Apocalypse is so peculiar in this respect. It is customary to speak of it as very bad Greek, the worst in the New Testament. And so, from one point

Granting that Galilee rather than Judæa was the home of Apocalyptic, the conclusion that the writer of any given Apocalypse was a Galilean can only be probable; there may have been exceptions. But the point is not of great importance.