The chief value of Revelation to the student of Christian origins is that by means of its clearly determinable date (Ephesus, 93-95) he can place himself at a point of vantage whence to look not only around him at the conditions of the Pauline churches as depicted in the letters, vexed with growing Gnostic heresy and moral laxity, but also both backward and forward. The backward glance shows Palestine emerging from the horrors of the Jewish war, filled with bitterness against Rome, held down under hateful tyranny and longing for vengeance upon the despot with his "names of blasphemy" and his demands of worship for "the image of the beast" (emperor-worship). Here Jewish apocalyptic (as in 2nd Esdras) and Christian 'prophecy' are closely in accord. Indeed a considerable part of the material of Rev. iv.-xxi., especially in chh. xi.-xii. is ultimately of Jewish rather than Christian origin. What the development of Christian 'prophecy' was in Palestine from apostolic times until the scattering of the church of "the apostles and elders" after the war of Bar Cocheba (135), we can only infer from the kindred Jewish apocalypses and the chiliastic "traditions of the Elders" quoted by Irenæus from Papias. A forward look from our vantage point in Ephesus _c._ A.D. 95, shows the effects of the Palestinian importation extending down from generation to generation, first in the long chiliastic controversy against the Doketic Gnostics, including Montanist 'prophecy'; secondly, in the growth of a claim to apostolic succession from John. (1) In the chiliastic controversy for a century the chief bones of contention are the (non-Pauline) doctrine of the resurrection of the _flesh_ (so the Apostles' Creed and the second-century fathers), and that of a visible reign of Christ for a thousand years in Jerusalem. The new form of resurrection-gospel which at about this time begins to take the place of the apostolic of 1st Cor. xv. 3-11, centering upon the emptiness of the sepulchre and the tangibility and food-consuming functions of Jesus' resurrection body, instead of the "manifestations" to the apostles, is characteristic of this struggle against the Greek disposition to spiritualize. Luke and Ignatius represent the attitude of the orthodox, Ignatius' opponents that of those who denied that Jesus was "in the flesh after his resurrection." Revelation, like the "traditions of the Elders," champions the visible kingdom of Messiah in Jerusalem.