A History of the End of the World

circle, school or community.”² Others see Revelation as a composite of several different and unrelated texts, each one written in a different time and place by a different author—or by various “schools”—and all of them cobbled together at some later date by a pious editor who struggled to impose some kind of order on the chaos of words and images.

But, thrillingly, most modern scholars agree that the book of Revelation is the work of a single author who was a mystic and a visionary, a charismatic preacher and a poet of unexcelled and enduring genius. Whether Revelation is read as Holy Writ or a work of literature, one of the great enterprises of biblical scholarship has been the effort to extract the biography of its author from the text itself and the traditions that have grown up around it. As we begin to glimpse the details of his life and work, however obliquely and speculatively, we will be able to read the book of Revelation in new and illuminating ways.

Not unlike the book of Jeremiah, Revelation opens with a straightforward claim of divine authorship with the assistance of a few celestial go-betweens and a human secretary. The text passes from God to Jesus to an angel and finally to a human being whose name is given as John: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place,” according to the opening lines of text, “and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John.”³ On the strength of these assertions, pious Christians have embraced the book of Revelation as “the only biblical book authored by Christ.”⁴

The claim of divine authorship is not so clear in the rest of the text itself. Revelation is written in the first person, but more than one narrator is speaking to us. Sometimes the voice we hear belongs to the human author who calls himself John, and sometimes John is merely quoting the various celestial figures whom he encounters— God, Jesus, and a series of angelic emissaries. Still, John clearly presents himself as the human being whose visions are recorded in the text, and he is commonly credited as its author. But we are still left with a nagging question: Is he the apostle whose name is given in the New Testament as John, son of Zebedee?

By way of self-introduction, John describes himself to the seven churches in Asia Minor for which the book of Revelation was originally intended: “I, John, your brother and comrade in tribulation and patient endurance in Jesus.”⁵ The fact that the author of Revelation calls himself “John,” however, hardly means that he is the same John who is mentioned in the Gospels. The Hebrew name “Yohanan” and its Greek equivalent, “Ioannes,” both of which are rendered in English translation as “John,” had been in common usage among both Jews and Christians long before the Gospels or Revelation were first composed. Indeed, the New Testament itself knows of several men called John, including not only the apostle John but also John the Baptist, a wandering preacher who is among the first to proclaim Jesus to be the Messiah.

The tradition that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation began with its first appearance among the Christian communities of the Roman Empire. Irenaeus (ca. 120–ca. 200), an influential Christian bishop in what is now the city of Lyons in southern France, reports that Revelation “was seen not very long ago, almost in our generation, at the close of the reign of Domitian”—that is, no later than 96 C.E.⁶ And Irenaeus is the very first commentator to attribute the authorship of Revelation to “John, the disciple of the Lord,” a belief that was affirmed by several other early church fathers, including Justin Martyr and Origen. But a more cautious bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria (ca. 200–ca. 265), while conceding that Revelation is a work “of which many good Christians have a very high opinion,” was the first to insist that Revelation and the Fourth Gospel “could not have been written by the same person.”⁷

Dionysius, like countless other Bible critics to come, was alert to the obvious and disturbing contrasts between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation, including the marked differences in the fundamental theological stance of each work: the Gospel embraces what theologians call a “present” eschatology, while Revelation knows only a “futuristic” one.⁸ According to certain passages in the Gospel of John, for example, Christians need not wait until the end-times to enjoy the blessing of eternal life; rather, they are saved in the here and now: “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die,” says Jesus. “He who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.”⁹ By contrast, Revelation insists that salvation must await the end of the world —the Tribulation, the Resurrection, and the Day of Judgment—at some unknown moment in the future when “the trumpet call is sounded by the seventh angel” and “the mystery of God is fulfilled.”¹⁰

Perhaps even more provocative, at least to expert readers of ancient Greek, are the differences in language and literary style between the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation. When scholars compare the words and phrases of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel in order to calculate the number of Greek terms that are used in both texts but nowhere else in the New Testament, they find only eight words in common.¹¹ An even more unsettling difference between the two texts is found in each author’s command of the common (or “Koine”) Greek in which the Christian scriptures are written. The Greek used in the Gospel is “correct and elegant,” while the Greek used in Revelation is “inaccurate and even barbarous,” according to Adela Yarbro Collins, a leading expert on the book of Revelation (and the spouse of John J. Collins, a fellow specialist in apocalyptic studies).¹²

Nowhere in Revelation, in fact, does the author claim to be the apostle John, nor does he refer to any experiences that might place him among the apostles during the lifetime of Jesus. Indeed, he appears to be uninterested in—and perhaps even unaware of—the life story of Jesus as it is described in such evocative detail in the Gospels. At one point in Revelation, he makes a passing reference to the twelve apostles in the third person, which strongly suggests that he was not claiming to be one of them. And when he mentions the apostles at all, it is only in his celebrated vision of the New Jerusalem that will descend from heaven after the end of the world: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,” he writes, “and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”¹³

Pious theologians and secular scholars alike have proposed some highly imaginative scenarios to explain how the same author might have written both Revelation and the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps, they suggest, the apostle John wrote Revelation when he was younger and wilder and only newly arrived in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire—and he wrote the Gospel when he was older and wiser, and only after he had acquired a mastery of Greek over long years of practice. Or perhaps he dictated the text of each book to a different secretary or translator, one far more skilled than the other—and, if so, the Gospel is the work of the more accomplished secretary, while Revelation suffered at the hands of the incompetent one.

Yet another explanation is that the apostle died before finishing one or both of the books. According to one ancient tradition, John was martyred for his faith sometime before 70 C.E., which is earlier than the dates assigned to the Fourth Gospel or Revelation by contemporary scholars. Perhaps, then, one or both of the books were completed after John’s death by two separate redactors, each with a different understanding of his theology and an unequal mastery of Greek. One modern Bible scholar strikes an even more provocative stance when he imagines that the text of Revelation fell into the hands of a posthumous ghostwriter who was not merely inept but intent on ruining the work of St. John the Evangelist—“an arch-heretic who betrays a depth of stupidity all but incomprehensible, and only matched by his ignorance.”¹⁴

Dionysius himself read the two books with pious but discerning eyes and was forced to conclude that Revelation was written by “another John”—that is, someone named John but not St. John the Evangelist.¹⁵Modern scholars share the same conviction. Bart Ehrman, for example, points out that the apostle John is described in the Gospels as illiterate, and thus could not plausibly have written any of the biblical works that are attributed to him.¹⁶ And the question of authorship is still being debated by scholars and theologians: “No subject of Biblical studies has provoked such elaborate and prolonged discussion,” complains one scholar, “and no discussion has been so bewildering, disappointing and unprofitable.”¹⁷

Indeed, readers of Revelation across the ages have never been able to resist asking the most daring and tantalizing question of all: If the author was not St. John the Evangelist, then who was the other John, the man who really wrote the book of Revelation?

One early and intriguing candidate for the authorship of Revelation, for example, is an otherwise obscure elder (or “presbyter”) of the early Christian church whose name was also John. He is first mentioned in the work of Papias, a bishop of the second century who is the earliest known commentator on the book of Revelation. The original writings of Papias are lost, but he is cited and quoted by other ancient sources who knew his work. According to a passage in the influential church history composed by Eusebius in the fourth century, for example, Papias was in the habit of seeking out elderly Christians of his acquaintance, the presbyter John among them, in an