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Dive into the mystery of the Book of Revelation with Jimmy Akin on this thrilling episode of The Jimmy Akin Podcast! Jimmy begins unraveling the controversy surrounding the Bible’s most enigmatic book, exploring its vivid symbols, dramatic visions, and the debate over its author—John the Apostle or John the Elder? He examines why Revelation was written, its prophetic warnings of persecution, and God’s judgment on the Roman world. Join Jimmy as he decodes this ancient text, challenging popular “end-times” theories in a captivating journey through Scripture’s ultimate prophecy!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
The book of Revelation—also known as the Apocalypse of St. John—is the most controversial book of the Bible.
Reading it is a fascinating, mesmerizing experience.
It is filled with dramatic images, compelling symbols, and enduring themes.
But what do we know about who wrote it—and why?
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
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Introduction
Revelation is so rich and thick with symbols that it can be daunting—and not just for ordinary laypeople. Many ministers hesitate to tackle it.
For example, it was the only book of the New Testament that the Protestant Reformer John Calvin did not write a commentary on.
But countless authors have written commentaries and other books expounding Revelation and what they think it means.
These books contain a bewildering array of different and conflicting interpretations, which contribute to the controversy surrounding it.
In recent years, there has been a flood of books, movies, and videos about Revelation.
Many explore what various “prophecy experts” hold will happen in the near future.
An example is Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth, which sold millions of copies and led to him writing popular follow-up books like The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, The Terminal Generation, and Planet Earth: The Final Chapter.
In such works Lindsey and other authors taught their readers to expect an imminent “rapture,” where all true Christians would be caught up to be with Jesus in heaven while all hell breaks loose on earth.
And the Rapture is something we can talk about in a future episode.
A set of books that popularized these ideas in fictional format was the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Spanning 16 volumes, these novels imagined what the world would be like before, during, and after the rapture and related events.
Despite the fact they were fiction, they claimed to be based on what Revelation predicted for our actual future.
A Perennial Temptation
It’s a perennial temptation to see the events of Revelation being fulfilled in one’s own day.
For the last two thousand years, many have thought that the world was about to end, and numerous authors have predicted exactly when in their lifetimes it would happen.
What all these efforts have in common is that, so far, all of these predictions have been wrong. They’ve all failed.
Scholars have dubbed the enterprise of interpreting Revelation in terms of current events “Newspaper Exegesis.”
Exegesis is the study of how to interpret a text, and newspaper exegesis involves bending Revelation and other prophetic texts to fit whatever happens to be in the news.
Some Evangelicals even have weekly radio programs and TV shows devoted to looking at current news items and reading them in light of what they take to be Bible prophecy.
But is this the right approach?
Should we really assume that the book of Revelation is talking about events in our near future and that the world is about to end?
The controversy over the book is principally due to the question of how it should be interpreted, and the different principles used to interpret it are responsible for the bewildering variety of theories that people have claimed it supports.
This is the first in a series of occasional episodes where we’ll be looking into the mystery of the book of Revelation.
What is the book of Revelation?
Revelation is one of the books of the New Testament.
Many assume that it was the last book of the Bible to be written, but this is something we do not know. Other books may have been written later.
One reason people think Revelation was written last is the fact it’s printed in the back of the Bible, making it last in canonical order.
This is because Revelation contains prophecies that describe the end of the world, so it’s logical to place it last in sequence.
But just because it’s last in logical order doesn’t mean that it was written last in chronological order.
The book of Revelation is also unique because, although the Old Testament contains many prophetic books, Revelation is the only one in the New Testament.
The four Gospels and the New Testament letters contain individual prophecies, but only Revelation is devoted entirely to the subject of prophecy.
Revelation also is different from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
Works like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel contain revelations that the prophets received at various points in their careers, and the books collect these prophecies and weave them together with historical incidents from their lives.
By contrast, Revelation presents its prophetic material as a single, grand vision.
We even know what day of the week the author began receiving it—a Sunday—because he tells us it began when
Revelation 1:10-11, ESV
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book.”
So on the Lord’s day—or Sunday—John received the vision that he wrote in the book.
It’s possible that he saw the vision all on a single day or that it started on a Sunday but he saw it in parts, and he just doesn’t mention the gaps between individual visions.
One way or the other, he apparently received it all in a short space of time rather than over a lengthy prophetic career.
The book is also different in another way.
While the Old Testament prophetic books are written to a general audience, Revelation is written to a specific one.
In fact, its literary form is that of a letter.
It uses the standard opening for first century letters, which involved a (Sender) to (Receivers) formula.
Thus, after an opening title and exhortation, we read,
Revelation 1:4, ESV
John to the seven churches that are in Asia.
The Asia being referred to here is not the continent of Asia but the ancient Roman province of Asia Minor, which is in the western part of the continent of Asia, in the western part of what is now Turkey.
And we know that there were more than seven churches in Asia Minor at the time, but John is writing to seven of them because seven is a number that symbolizes completeness.
So—in a way—John is writing to all churches.
The book of Revelation is thus, in essence, a gigantic letter communicating the prophetic material the author received.
And, by ancient standards, it was gigantic.
As E. Randolph Richards writes in his book Paul and First Century Letter Writing:
- Randolph Richards, Paul and First Century Letter Writing
In the approximately 14,000 private letters from Greco-Roman antiquity, the average length was about 87 words, ranging in length from 18 to 209 words.
By contrast, Revelation is 9,852 words long in Greek, making it more than a hundred times the size of a normal letter!
It’s longer than any other letter of the New Testament, and it’s almost as long as the Gospel of Mark.
John’s readers must have been astonished when they got it!
Now, when inspiring Scripture, God used the knowledge and background of the biblical authors, and it is clear that John had a detailed, intimate knowledge of the Old Testament prophetic books.
Revelation contains more than a hundred references to them.
And now that Jesus had come, the author realized that the whole prophetic enterprise of the Hebrew Bible was coming together and being crowned by his own work.
As scholar Richard Bauckham states in his book The Climax of Prophecy:
Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy
[John] understood his prophecy to be the climax of the tradition of Old Testament prophecy, because in the revelation made to him by Jesus Christ was disclosed the secret of the divine purpose for the final coming of the kingdom of God.
John thus realized that he was writing a work that summed up and brought to culmination the labors of all the biblical prophets before him.
Revelation is a momentous book!
Who wrote Revelation?
What do we know about who wrote the book of Revelation?
Well, four times, the book of Revelation identifies its author as “John.”
- Revelation 1:1
- Revelation 1:4
- Revelation 1:9
- Revelation 22:8
But John was an extremely popular name at the time.
In fact, John was the 5th most common name for Jewish men in Palestine in this period.
The fact John does not further identify himself—like calling himself John Mark, John son of Zebedee, or John of Jerusalem—shows that he must have been well-known to his audience.
Revelation 1:9, ESV
I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
He only says that he is your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus.
The only biographical detail he adds is that, when he saw the vision, he “was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Patmos is a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. It is only 13 square miles in size.
The fact John says he was on the island because of “the testimony of Jesus” could mean that he was there on an evangelizing mission, but the context of persecution and tribulation has convinced scholars that John was on Patmos as a punishment for his Christian preaching.
This has led some people to claim that Patmos was a penal colony, but the evidence does not support that.
It is more likely that John had been banished or exiled to Patmos from a major city.
Banishment was a common way of dealing with troublesome, upper-class individuals as an alternative to execution or forced labor.
A person in exile would be allowed to live in a remote location—away from where he had been causing trouble.
And this seems to have been why John was on Patmos.
There is also a question of which John wrote Revelation.
Historically, the most popular view is that it was John son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles.
This view can be traced to as early as A.D. 155, when it was endorsed in the writings of St. Justin Martyr. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, he stated:
Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 81:4
There was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him.
However, there is a dispute about this in the early Church Fathers.
Some say that they do not know who wrote Revelation and doubt its apostolic authorship.
Others suggest that it was written by a figure known as John the Elder or John the Presbyter. Elder and = Presbyter mean the same thing.
According to early sources, John the Elder was not one of the Twelve, but he was an eyewitness of the ministry of Christ.
In later years he—like John son of Zebedee—lived in Ephesus, resulting in two famous Johns having their tombs there (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:4-6).
Some Church Fathers also attribute some of the Johannine books of the New Testament to him.
St. Jerome reports that many held him to be the author of 2 and 3 John (Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men ch.s 9, 18),
And some in the early Church suggested John the Elder was the John who wrote Revelation (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:6).
This may be supported by the fact that John the apostle was an uneducated, Galilean fisherman from the lower class (Acts 4:13) and not the kind of person who would receive the mild punishment of exile.
It has been argued that John the Elder was a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy.
And the option of exile was often applied to members of the upper class when the death penalty would have been used on members of the lower class who had committed the same crime.
Why Was Revelation Written?
Whoever wrote the book, the reason why it was written is made clear in its opening verse, which describes it as
Revelation 1:1, ESV
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.
The Greek term for Revelation— = Apokalupsis—is the origin of our word “apocalypse.”
That’s why the book is sometimes called The Revelation of John and sometimes = The Apocalypse of John.
Or, more simply, the book of Revelation.
And—by the way—the word is singular, not plural. It’s Revelation, not Revelations. If you say Revelations, plural, you’ll signal that you don’t have any real knowledge of the book since you aren’t getting its name right.
So don’t do that.
In the first century, the word revelation meant “a revealing,” so the book reveals information given by Jesus Christ.
And that information concerns “what must soon take place” from John’s first century perspective.
He was writing to warn his readers of a series of events in the Roman world that would involve the persecution of Christians and God’s judgement on the pagan world order that oppressed them.
So what were these persecutions, and what were the judgments?
Those are things we’ll talk about in an upcoming episode.
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