Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
The author of the fourth gospel speaks of John in the third
person, “and scorned to blot it with a name.” But so does Cæsar
speak of himself in his Commentaries. Harnack regards both the
fourth gospel and the Revelation as the work of John the Presbyter
or Elder, the former written not later than about 110 A. D.; the
latter from 93 to 96, but being a revision of one or more
underlying Jewish apocalypses. Vischer has expounded this view of
the Revelation; and Porter holds substantially the same, in his
article on the Book of Revelation in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary,
4:239-266. “It is the obvious advantage of the Vischer-Harnack
hypothesis that it places the original work under Nero and its
revised and Christianized edition under Domitian.” (Sanday,
Inspiration, 371, 372, nevertheless dismisses this hypothesis as
raising worse difficulties than it removes. He dates the
Apocalypse between the death of Nero and the destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus.) Martineau, Seat of Authority, 227, presents
the moral objections to the apostolic authorship, and regards the
Revelation, from chapter 4:1 to 22:5, as a purely Jewish document
of the date 66-70, supplemented and revised by a Christian, and
issued not earlier than 136: “How strange that we should ever have
thought it possible for a personal attendant upon the ministry of
Jesus to write or edit a book mixing up fierce Messianic
conflicts, in which, with the sword, the gory garment, the
blasting flame, the rod of iron, as his emblems, he leads the
war-march, and treads the winepress of the wrath of God until the
deluge of blood rises to the horses’ bits, with the speculative
Christology of the second century, without a memory of his life, a
feature of his look, a word from his voice, or a glance back at
the hillsides of Galilee, the courts of Jerusalem, the road to
Bethany, on which his image must be forever seen!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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