him beyond and irrespective of ordinary means for the work of writing. However elevated the theme he undertook, he was assisted in {xliii} employing diction as elevated as the nature of the subject demanded. We place, therefore, little reliance upon the argument derived from _the time of life_ at which the Apocalypse was composed, though Olshausen and Guerike insist upon it. Written, as they think, twenty years before the Gospel or Epistles, the Apocalypse exhibits marks of inexperience in writing, of youthful fire, and of an ardent temperament. It exhibits the first essays of one expressing his ideas in a language to which he was unaccustomed. This may be true; but we lay far less stress upon it than these authors seem inclined to do. The strong Hebraized diction of the book we account for on the ground that the writer was a Jew; and, as such, expressed his Jewish conceptions in Greek; that he imitated the later Old Testament prophets, especially the manner of Daniel; and that the only prophetic writing in the New Testament naturally approaches nearer the Old Testament, if not in subject, at least in colouring and linguistic features. “These considerations may serve to throw light upon the language of the book, after all the extravagancies of assertion in regard to anomalies, solecisms, and ruggednesses, have been fairly estimated. For it cannot be denied that many rash and unwarrantable assumptions have been made by De Wette and others relative to the impure Greek said to be contained in the Apocalypse. Winer has done much to check such bold assertions, but with little success in the case of those who are resolved to abide by a strong and prevalent current of opinion. We venture to affirm, without fear of contradiction, that there are books in the New Testament almost as Hebraizing as the Apocalypse; and that the anomalies charged to the account of the Hebrew language may be paralleled in other parts of the New Testament, or in classical Greek. What shall be said, for instance, to the attempt of Hitzig to demonstrate from the language of Mark’s Gospel, as compared with that of the Apocalypse, that both proceeded from one author, viz. John Mark? This author has conducted a lengthened investigation with the view of showing that all the peculiarities of language found in the Apocalypse are equally presented in the second Gospel, particularly that the Hebraisms of the one correspond with those of the other. Surely this must lead to new investigations of the Apocalyptic diction, and possibly to a renunciation of those extravagant assertions so often made in regard to the harsh, rugged, Hebraized Greek of the Apocalypse. Who ever dreamed before of the numerous solecisms of Mark’s language? and yet Hitzig has demonstrated its similarity to the Apocalyptic as plausibly as Ewald, Lücke, and others have proved the total dissimilarity between the diction of the Apocalypse and that of John’s Gospel.