The outstanding characteristic of Revelation is its adaptation of literary material dealing with, and applicable to, one historical and geographical situation, to another situation almost completely different. The opening chapters, devoted to "John's" vision on Patmos and the conditions and dangers of the seven Churches of Asia, employ indeed some of the expressions of the substance of the book. The promises of the Spirit to the churches recall the glories of the New Jerusalem of the concluding vision of the seer. There is some reference to local persecution at Smyrna incited by the Jews ("a synagogue of Satan") and which is to last "ten days," and there is an isolated reference to a martyrdom of days long gone by in the message to the church in Pergamum (ii. 13) recalling remotely the blood and suffering of which the body of the work is full. This we should of course expect from an adapter of existing 'prophecies.' But the converse, _i. e._ consideration for the historical conditions of Ephesus and its sister churches, on the part of the body of the work, is absolutely wanting. On the one side is the situation of the Pauline churches on the east coast of the Ægean in A.D. 93-95. The prologue and epilogue (Rev. i.-iii. and xxii. 6-21) are concerned with these churches of Asia, and their development in the faith, particularly their growth in good works, purity from defilements of the world, and resistance to the inroads of heretical teaching. The message of the Spirit, conveyed through "John," is meant to encourage the members of these churches to pure living in the face of temptations to worldliness and impurity. The epistles to the churches, in a word, belong in the same class with the Pastorals, Jude, and 2nd Peter, as regards their object and the situation confronted; though they are written to enclose apocalyptic visions which deal with a totally different situation.