Who actually wrote Revelation?
I know some people think it was just an otherwise unknown Christian, someone whose identity never got preserved but I don’t know why.
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The traditional answer is John the Apostle. Most of the early church believed that, and second-century writers like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus said so. The author only ever calls himself John and never claims to be an apostle. As early as the third century, a bishop named Dionysius of Alexandria pointed out that the Greek style is different from the Gospel of John. From there people started talking about a John of Patmos or John the Elder, possibly a well-known leader in the churches of Asia Minor who wasn’t one of the Twelve.
I lean toward the apostle. An exiled man writing down visions in his second language could sound rougher than someone writing a polished Gospel. What got you looking into this?
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Justin Martyr and Irenaeus say the author was the apostle. The fact that it’s a vision instead of a Gospel might account for the style differences. Still, that doesn’t prove the same person wrote both books. John the Apostle seems like a good candidate, though the text allows for another John who knew those churches.
Revelation was written by a Christian prophet named John while he was on Patmos. The 7 churches in Asia Minor he was writing to already knew who he was. His readers didn’t need more than his name, since he doesn’t give them anything else.
He may well have been John the Apostle. The book itself doesn’t settle it, though. So I call him John of Patmos and treat the apostle link as an old tradition. I still take Revelation as inspired Scripture either way. God didn’t leave us a signed author bio, and I don’t see why I should pretend he did.
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I get why “otherwise unknown Christian” makes you unsure. The writer only tells us his name is John and that he’s a fellow believer going through the same trouble as his readers. He says he ended up on Patmos for holding onto Jesus.
A lot of visionary writings from that era were put under famous names, like Enoch or Ezra. This book doesn’t do that. The author uses his own common name and describes a real exile, with a punishment already handed down. That points to someone the churches could identify, and the authorities as well. I think John wrote Revelation, even if we lost the rest of his story.
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Calling him John of Patmos is perfectly fine, though some of us manage to hold the apostle tradition without feeling like we’re pretending anything.
Good point about an exiled writer recording visions in a second language. That makes the style difference a weaker argument than Dionysius thought.
Genre matters too. Revelation and the Gospel are different kinds of writing, so you’d expect the Greek to differ anyway. Maybe a secretary or editor helped polish the Gospel while Revelation kept John’s rougher style. Does that move you toward John the Apostle, or does the author never calling himself an apostle still bother you?
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The genre difference makes me less inclined to rule out John the Apostle on style alone. As for the missing title, John addresses churches that may already have known him. He might not have needed to introduce himself as an apostle. I lean toward the traditional identification, but I don’t think Revelation settles it.
The testimony for the apostle link is early and specific. Justin Martyr identified Revelation’s John as one of Christ’s apostles, and Irenaeus later said the same.
‘John of Patmos’ works fine as a neutral label since the book itself never says ‘John the Apostle.’ don’t let that label imply we have evidence for some separate, otherwise-known John of Patmos.
He doesn’t pull rank at all. He calls himself a brother and companion in tribulation, which is a strange way to open when you’re handing 7 churches a vision from Christ.
If the churches already knew who he was, like you said with the Patmos detail, that would explain why he never spells out his credentials. The fellow sufferer bit still sticks out to me. It says something about how he saw his own standing with them, whatever the churches knew about his name.
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I never thought about how exposed he was, naming himself plainly while already under sentence and that quiets something in me.
Makes sense. It also makes a unknown John less likely.
If the readers already knew who he was and what he’d been through, mentioning Patmos and the persecution they were all dealing with would have been enough to identify him.
It mostly comes down to one sentence from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early 100s.
In the part Eusebius preserves, Papias mentions John with Peter and the other apostles, then names Aristion and “the elder John.” Eusebius took that as two different men. Dionysius of Alexandria had already noted 2 tombs in Ephesus both called John’s, and Eusebius ran with the idea that the second John was probably the one who saw Revelation.
So when people say “a different John,” they mean this John the Elder. But whether he was a separate person depends on how you read Papias, and plenty of scholars still think it’s the same guy.
There’s also the older idea that one shrine was over his grave outside the walls and the other marked where he lived inside the city. 2 memorials for one famous man isn’t that strange, and John was a common name anyway.
Eusebius wasn’t exactly neutral. He didn’t like the thousand-year reign in Revelation, so handing the book off to a lesser John helped his argument.
Victorinus, who wrote the earliest commentary we have on Revelation, says Domitian sent John to the mines on Patmos and he was released after Domitian died. Clement of Alexandria has the same story about John returning from the island once “the tyrant” was gone, an old man by then.
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John was probably just a teenager when he followed Jesus around, and he went from being this young disciple to the one Jesus trusted to look after his mother. Decades later he was still sharing the gospel, outlasting every other apostle since they were all martyred. He ends up exiled on Patmos, still writing and still faithful.
We have solid evidence that John wrote it. Justin Martyr identified the John of Revelation as one of Christ’s apostles, and Irenaeus said the same thing later on.
There’s a pretty clear trail of testimony going back to people who were much closer to that time than we are.
Early church writers weren’t always careful about what they passed along. Irenaeus even claimed Jesus died as an old man past fifty, which tells you something about how traditions got handled.
Keep that in mind when weighing who wrote Revelation. The author names himself plainly and describes a real exile, and that sets this book apart from the pseudonymous writings floating around at the time.