NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND PROPHECY.
The Acts of the Apostles contains the history of the Christian church
from the time of the ascension of our Lord to the end of the second year
of Paul's first imprisonment at Rome. The period covered by the history
is therefore only about thirty years. The principal events recorded in
it are the great Pentecostal Revival, the Martyrdom of Stephen, the
first persecution of the church and the dispersion of the disciples, the
conversion and the missionary work of Paul, with the circumstances of
his arrest at Jerusalem, his journey as a prisoner to Rome, and a brief
account of his residence in that city. In the first part of the book
Peter, the leader of the apostolic band, is the central figure; the last
part is occupied with the life and work of Paul.
Who is the writer? Irenæus, about 182, names Luke as the author of the
book, and speaks as though the fact were undisputed. He calls him "a
follower and disciple of apostles," and declares that "he was
inseparable from Paul and was his fellow-helper in the gospel." This is
the earliest distinct reference to the book in any ancient Christian
writing. After this, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and
Eusebius bear the same testimony. But these are late witnesses. The
earliest of them testified a hundred years after the death of Luke. The
direct testimony to the existence of this book in the first two cenuries
is not, therefore, altogether satisfactory. The indirect testimony is,
however, clear and strong.
That the Acts was written by the author of the Third Gospel is scarcely
doubted by any critical scholar. The fact of the identity of authorship
is stated with the utmost explicitness in the introduction of the Acts.
"The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus
began both to do and to teach" (Luke i. I, 2). The author of the Acts of
the Apostles certainly intends to say that he is the writer of the Third
Gospel. If he is not the author of the Third Gospel he is an artful and
shameless deceiver. But the whole atmosphere of the book forbids the
theory that it is a cunning imposition. And the internal evidence that
the two books were written by the same author is ample and convincing.
The style and the method of the treatment of the two books are
unmistakably identical. Every page bears witness to the fact that the
author of the Third Gospel and the author of the Acts are one and the
same person. Now we know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Gospel
of Luke was written certainly as early as the year 80 A. D. And there is
as good reason, as we have seen already, for accepting the ancient and
universal tradition of the church that Luke was its author. If Luke
wrote the two books, the date of both of them is carried back to the
last part of the first century. But the concluding portion of the Acts
of the Apostles seems to fix the date of that book much more precisely.
The author, after narrating Paul's journey to Rome, his arrival there,
and his first unsatisfactory interview with the Jewish leaders, closes
his book with this compendious statement:--
"And he abode two whole years in his own hired dwelling, and received
all that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching
all things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, none
forbidding him."
This is the last word in the New Testament history respecting the
Apostle Paul. Now it is evident that this writer was Paul's friend and
traveling companion. It is true that he keeps himself out of sight in
the history. We only know when he joined Paul by the fact that the
narrative changes from the third person singular to the first person
plural; he ceases to say "he," and begins to say "we." Thus we are made
aware that he joined Paul at Troas on his second missionary journey, and
went with him as far as Philippi; rejoined him at the same place on his
third missionary tour, and accompanied him to Jerusalem; was his
fellow-voyager on that memorable journey to Rome, and there abode with
him for two years. The Epistle to the Colossians and the Epistle to
Philemon were written during this imprisonment at Rome, and in both of
these Epistles Paul speaks of the fact that Luke is near him. In the
second letter to Timothy, which is supposed to have been written during
the second imprisonment at Rome, and near the close of his life, he says
again, "Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him unto me, for he
is useful to me for ministering." If the common opinion concerning the
date of this letter is correct, then Luke must have remained with Paul
at Rome until the close of his life. But the narrative in Luke does not
give any account of the closing years of Paul's life. It breaks off
abruptly at the end of his two years' residence in Rome. Why is this?
Evidently because there is no more to tell at this time. The writer
continues the history up to the date of his writing and stops there. If
he had been writing after the death of Paul, he would certainly have
told us of the circumstances of his death. There is no rational
explanation of this abrupt ending, except that the book was written at
about the time when the story closes. This was certainly about 63 A. D.
And if the Book of Acts was written as early as this, the Gospel of
Luke, the "former treatise" by the same author, must have been written
earlier than this. Thus the Book of Acts not only furnishes strong
evidence of its own early date, but helps to establish the early date of
the third Gospel.
These conclusions, to my own mind, are irresistible. No theory which
consists with the common honesty of the writer can bring these books
down to a later date. And I cannot doubt the honesty of the writer. His
writings prove him to be a careful, painstaking, veracious historian. In
many slight matters this accuracy appears. The political structure of
the Roman Empire at this time was somewhat complicated. The provinces
were divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those heads of
provinces who were directly responsible to the Emperor and the military
authorities were called proprætors; those who were under the
jurisdiction of the Senate were called proconsuls. In mentioning these
officers Luke never makes a mistake; he gets the precise title every
time. Once, indeed, the critics thought they had caught him in an error.
Sergius Paulus, the Roman ruler of Cyprus, he calls proconsul. "Wrong!"
said the critics, "Cyprus was an imperial province; the title of this
officer must have been proprætor." But when the critics studied a little
more, they found out that Augustus put this province back under the
Senate, so that Luke's title is exactly right. And to clinch the matter,
old coins of this very date have been found in Cyprus, giving to the
chief magistrate of the island the title of proconsul. Such evidences of
the accuracy of the writer are not wanting. It is needless to insist
that he never makes a mistake; doubtless he does, in some small matters,
and we have learned to take such a view of the inspiration of the
Scriptures that the discovery of some small error does not trouble us in
the least; but the admission that he is not infallible is perfectly
consistent with the belief that he is an honest, competent, faithful
witness. This is all that he claims for himself, this is all that we
claim for him, but this we do claim. We do not believe that he was a
conscienceless impostor. We do not believe that the man who told the
story of Ananias and Sapphira was himself a monumental liar. We believe
that he meant to tell the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth. Therefore, we believe that he lived in the times of the
apostles, and received from them, as he says that he did, the facts that
he recorded in his Gospel; that he was the traveling companion and
missionary helper of Paul, as he intimates that he was, and that he has
given us a true account of the life and work of that great apostle.
The constant and undesigned coincidences between the Acts of the
Apostles and the Epistles of Paul--the many ways in which the personal
and historical references of the latter support the statements of the
former--are also strong evidence of the genuineness of the Acts. Putting
all these indirect and incidental proofs together the historical verity
of the Acts seems to me very firmly established. That there are critical
difficulties may be admitted; some passages of this ancient writing are
not easily explained; there are discrepancies, for example, between the
story of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as told in Luke and
the same story as related in the Acts; possibly the writer obtained
fuller information in the interval between the publication of these two
books by which he corrected the earlier narrative. In the different
accounts of the conversion of Paul there are also disagreements which we
cannot reconcile; nevertheless, in the words of Dr. Donaldson, "Even
these very accounts contain evidence in them that they were written by
the same writer, and they do not destroy the force of the rest of the
evidence." [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, i. 124. ]
The theory of Baur that this book was written in the last part of the
second century by a disciple of St. Paul, and that it is mainly a work
of fiction, intended to bring about a reconciliation between two
bitterly hostile parties in the church, the Pauline and the Petrine
sects, need not detain us long. Baur contends that the church in the
first two centuries was split in twain, the followers of Peter insisting
that no man could become a Christian without first becoming a Jew, the
followers of Paul maintaining that the Jewish ritual was abolished, and
that the Gentiles ought to have immediate access to the Christian
fellowship. Their antagonism was so radical and far-reaching that at the
end of the apostolic age the two parties had no dealings with each
other. "Then," in the words of Professor Fisher, who is here summarizing
the theory of Baur, "followed attempts to reconcile the difference, and
to bridge the gulf that separated Gentile from Jewish, Pauline from
Petrine Christianity. To this end various irenical and compromising
books were written in the name of the apostles and their helpers. The
most important monument of this pacifying effort is the Book of Acts,
written in the earlier part of the second century by a Pauline Christian
who, by making Paul something of a Judaizer, and then representing Peter
as agreeing with him in the recognition of the rights of the Gentiles,
hoped, not in vain, to produce a mutual friendliness between the
respective partisans of the rival apostles. The Acts is a fiction
founded on facts, and written for a specific doctrinal purpose. The
narrative of the council or conference of the Apostles, for example
(Acts xx.), is pronounced a pure invention of the writer, and such a
representation of the condition of things as is inconsistent with Paul's
own statements, and for this and other reasons plainly false. The same
ground is taken in respect to the conversion of Cornelius, and the
vision of Peter concerning it." [Footnote: _The Supernatural Origin of
Christianity,_ pp. 211,212.]
For this theory there is, of course, some slight historical basis. It is
true, as we have seen, that Peter and Paul did have a sharp disagreement
on this very question at Antioch. It is also true that both these great
apostles behaved quite inconsistently, Peter at Antioch, and Paul
afterwards at Jerusalem, when he consented to the propositions of the
Judaizers, and burdened himself with certain Jewish observances in a
vain attempt to conciliate some of the weaker brethren. That the story
of the Acts unflinchingly shows us the weaknesses and errors of the
great apostles is good evidence of its veracity. But the notion that it
is a work of fiction fabricated for such purposes as are outlined above
is utterly incredible. Those Epistles of Paul which Baur admits to be
genuine contain abundant disproof of his theory. There never was any
such schism as he fancies. Paul spends a good part of his time in his
last missionary journey in collecting funds for the relief of those poor
"saints," for so he calls them, at Jerusalem; and every reference that
he makes to them is of the most affectionate character. Paul recognizes
in the most emphatic way the authority of the other apostles, and the
fellowship of labor and suffering by which he is united to them. All
this and much more of the same import we find in those epistles which
Baur admits to be the genuine writings of Paul. In short, it may be said
that after the thorough discussion to which his theory has been
subjected for the last twenty-five years, it has scarcely a sound leg
left to stand on. It may be admitted to be one of the most brilliant
works of the historical imagination which the century has produced. It
is supported by vast learning, and it has thrown much light on certain
movements of the early church; but, taken as a whole it is unscientific
and contradictory; it raises two difficulties, where it disposes of one,
and it ignores more facts than it includes.
We return from this excursion through the fields of destructive
criticism with a strong conviction that this narrative of the Acts of
the Apostles was written by Luke the Evangelist, the companion and
fellow-worker of Paul, and that it gives us a veracious history of the
earliest years of the Christian church.
The last of the New Testament books does not belong chronologically at
the end of the collection. There was a tradition, to which Irenæus gives
currency, that it was written during the reign of Domitian, about 97 or
98 A. D. But this tradition is now almost universally discredited.
Critics of all classes date the book as early as 75-79 A. D., while the
best authorities put it nearly ten years earlier, in the autumn of 68 or
the spring of 69. As Archdeacon Farrar suggests, it would be vastly
better if these books of the New Testament were arranged in true
chronological order; they could be more easily understood. The fact that
this weird production stands at the end of the collection has made upon
many minds a wrong impression as to its meaning, and has given it a kind
of significance to which it is not entitled.
The authorship of the book is quite generally ascribed to John the son
of Zebedee, brother of James, and one of the apostles of our Lord. Even
the destructive critics agree to this; some among them say that there is
less doubt about the date and the authorship of this book than about
almost any other New Testament writing. In making this concession they
intend, however, to discredit the Johannine authorship of the Fourth
Gospel. The more certain we are that John wrote the Revelation, they
argue, the more certain are we that he did not write the Gospel which
bears his name; for the style of the two writings is so glaringly
contrasted that it is simply impossible that both could have come from
the same writer. This does not seem nearly so clear to me as it does to
some of these learned and perspicacious critics. A great contrast there
is, indeed, between the style of the Revelation and that of the Gospel;
but this contrast may be explained. It is said, in the first place, that
the Greek of the Apocalypse is very bad Greek, full of ungrammatical
sentences, abounding in Hebraisms, while that of the Gospel is good
Greek, accurate and rhetorical in its structure. But this is by no means
an unaccountable phenomenon. The first book was written by the apostle
very soon, probably, after his removal to Ephesus. He had never, I
suppose, been accustomed to use the Greek familiarly in his own country;
had never written in it at all, and it is not strange that he should
express himself awkwardly when he first began to write Greek; that the
Aramaic idioms should constantly reproduce themselves in his Greek
sentences. After he had been living for twenty-five years in the
cultivated Greek city of Ephesus, using the Greek language continually,
it is probable that he would write it more elegantly.
But it is said that the rhetorical style of the one book differs
radically from that of the other. Doubtless. The one book is an
apocalypse, the other is a biography. John may not have been a practiced
_litterateur,_ but he certainly had literary sense and feeling
enough to know how to put a very different color and atmosphere into an
apocalyptical writing from that which he would employ in a report of the
life and words of Jesus. Without any reflection, indeed, he would
instinctively use the apocalyptic imagery; his pages would flare and
resound with the lurid symbolism peculiar to the apocalypses. How
definite a type of literature this was we shall presently see; no
writer, while using it, would clearly manifest his own personality. And
if through all this disguise we do discern symptoms of a temper more
fervid and a spirit more Judaic than that which finds expression in the
Fourth Gospel, let us remember that the ripened wisdom of the old man
speaks in the latter, and the intense enthusiasm of conscious strength
in the former. This John, let us not forget, was not in his youth a
paragon of mildness; it was he and his brother James who earned the
sobriquet of Boanerges, "Sons of thunder;" it was they who wanted to
call down fire from heaven to consume an inhospitable Samaritan village.
Moreover, we shall see as we go on that the times in which this
apocalypse was written were times in which the mildest, mannered men
would be apt to forget their decorum, and speak with unwonted intensity.
A man with any blood in him, who undertook to write in the year 68 of
the themes with which the soul of this apostle was then on fire, would
be likely to show, no matter in what vehicle of speech his thought might
be conveyed, some sign of the tumult then raging within him.
All these circumstances, taken together, enable me to explain the
difference between the literary form of the Revelation and that of the
Gospel. But when we come to look a little more deeply into the meaning
of the two books, we shall find that beneath all this dissimilarity
there are some remarkable points of agreement. Quite a number of the
leading ideas and conceptions of the one book reappear in the other; the
idea of Christ as the _Word_ or _Logos_ of God, the representation
of Christ as the Lamb, as the Good Shepherd, as the Light, are peculiar to
John; we find them emphasized in the Gospel and in the Revelation. The
unity of the two books in fundamental conceptions has been admirably
brought out by Dr. Sears, in his volume entitled "The Heart of Christ."
And after weighing the evidence, I find neither historical nor
psychological reasons sufficient to overthrow my belief that the Fourth
Gospel, as well as the Revelation, was written by John the Apostle.
The Greek name of the book means an uncovering or unveiling, and is
fairly interpreted, therefore, by our word Revelation. It belongs to a
class of books which were produced in great numbers during the two
centuries preceding the birth of Christ and the two centuries following;
and no one can understand it or interpret it who does not know something
of this species of literature, of the forms of expression peculiar to
it, and of the purposes which it was intended to serve.
We have in the Old Testament one Apocalyptic book, that of Daniel, and
there are apocalyptical elements in two or three of the prophecies. The
fact that the Book of Daniel bears this character is a strong argument
for the lateness of its origin; for it was in the last years of the
Jewish nationality that this kind of writing became popular. We have six
or seven books of this kind, which are written mainly from the
standpoint of the old dispensation, part of which appeared just before
and part shortly after the beginning of our era; and there are nearly a
dozen volumes of Christian apocalypses, all of which employ similar
forms of expression, and are directed towards similar ends. Doubtless
these are only a few of the great number of apocalyptical books which
those ages produced. Their characteristics are well set forth by Dr.
Davidson:--
"This branch of later Jewish literature took its rise after the older
prophecy had ceased, when Israel suffered sorely from Syrian and Roman
oppression. Its object was to encourage and comfort the people by
holding forth the speedy restoration of the Davidic Kingdom of Messiah.
Attaching itself to the national hope, it proclaimed the impending of a
glorious future, in which Israel freed from her enemies should enjoy a
peaceful and prosperous life under her long-wished-for deliverer. The
old prophets became the vehicle of these utterances. Revelations,
sketching the history of Israel and of heathenism, are put into their
mouths. The prophecies take the form of symbolical images and marvelous
visions.... Working in this fashion upon the basis of well-known
writings, imitating their style, and artificially reproducing their
substance, the authors naturally adopted the anonymous. The difficulty
was increased by their having to paint as future, events actually near,
and to fit the manifestation of a personal Messiah into the history of
the times. Many apocalyptists employed obscure symbols and mysterious
pictures, veiling the meaning that it might not be readily seen.
[Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, i. 174. ]
"Every time," says Dr. Harnack, "the political situation culminated in a
crisis for the people of God, the apocalypses appeared stirring up the
believers; in spirit, form, plan, and execution they closely resembled
each other.... They all spoke in riddles; that is, by means of images,
symbols, mystic numbers, forms of animals, etc., they half concealed
what they meant to reveal. The reasons for this procedure are not far to
seek: (1.) Clearness and distinctness would have been too profane; only
the mysterious appears divine. (2.) It was often dangerous to be too
distinct." [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, xx. 496. ]
That these writings appeared in troublous times, and that they dealt
with affairs of the present and of the immediate future, must always be
borne in mind. Certain symbolical conceptions are common to them;
earthquakes denote revolutions; stars falling from heaven typify the
downfall of kings and dynasties; a beast is often the emblem of a
tyrant; the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into blood
signify carnage and destruction upon the earth. We have these symbolisms
in several of the Old Testament writings as well as in many of the
apocalyptical books which are not in our canon; and the interpretation
of such passages is not at all difficult when we understand the usage of
the writers.
Of these apocalyptic books one of the most remarkable is the Book of
Enoch, which appears to have been written a century or two before
Christ. It purports to be a revelation made to and through the patriarch
Enoch; it contains an account of the fall of the angels, and of a
progeny of giants that sprung from the union of these exiled celestials
with the daughters of men; it takes Enoch on a tour of observation
through heaven and earth under the guidance of angels, who explain to
him many things supernal and mundane; it deals in astronomical and
meteorological mysteries of various sorts, and in a series of symbolical
visions seeks to disclose the events of the future. It is a grotesque
production; one does not find much spiritual nutriment in it, but Jude
makes a quotation from it, in his epistle, as if he considered it Holy
Scripture.
"The Fourth Book of Esdras" is another Jewish book of the same kind,
which may have been written about the hundredth year of our era. It
purports to be the work of Ezra, whom it misplaces, chronologically,
putting him in the thirtieth year of the Captivity. The problem of the
writer is the restoration of the nation, destroyed and scattered by the
Roman power. He makes the ancient scribe and law-giver of Israel his
mouthpiece, but he is dealing with the events of his own time.
Nevertheless, his allusions are veiled and obscure; he speaks in
riddles, yet he speaks to a people who understand his riddles, and know
how to take his symbolic visions. This book is in our English Apocrypha,
under the title 2 Esdras.
"The Book of Jubilees," which assumes to be a revelation made to Moses
on Mount Sinai, "The Ascension of Moses," "The Apocalypse of Moses," and
the "Apocalypse of Baruch," are other similar books of the Jewish
literature.
Of apocalyptical Christian writings, I may mention "The Sibylline
Books," "The Apocalypse of Paul," "The Apocalypse of Peter," "The
Revelation of Bartholomew," and "The Ascension of Isaiah," and there is
also another "Apocalypse of John," a feeble imitation of the one with
which our canon closes. These books appeared in the second, third, and
fourth centuries of our era; they generally look forward to the second
coming of Christ, and set forth in various figures and symbols the
conflicts and persecutions which his saints must encounter, the
destruction of his foes, and the establishment of his kingdom.
It will be seen, therefore, that the Revelation of St. John is not
unique; and the inference will not be rash that much light may be thrown
upon its dark sayings by a careful study of kindred books.
It may be answered that the writer of this book is inspired, and that
nothing can be learned of the meaning of an inspired book by studying
uninspired books. I reply that no inspired book can be understood at all
without a careful study of uninspired books. The Greek grammar and the
Greek lexicon are uninspired books, and no man can understand a single
one of the books of the New Testament without carefully studying both of
them, or else availing himself of the labor of some one else who has
diligently studied them. An inspired writer uses language,--the same
language that uninspired writers use; the meaning of language is fixed
not by inspiration, but by usage; you must study the grammar and the
lexicon to learn about the usage. And the case is precisely similar when
an inspired writer uses a peculiar form of literature like the
apocalyptical writings. He knows when he uses symbolisms of this class
that they will be interpreted according to the common usage; he expects
and desires that they shall be so understood; and, therefore, in order
to understand them, we must know what the usage is.
When our Lord, speaking of the calamities which were about to fall upon
the Jewish people, said, "Immediately after the tribulation of those
days, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,
and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens
shall be shaken," he was speaking to people who were perfectly familiar
with language of this sort, because the same expressions occur over and
over again in their prophets, and are there distinctly declared to mean
great political overturnings. He used the apocalyptic phraseology, and
he expected them to give it the apocalyptic signification. If we wish to
understand the Scripture, we must understand the language of Scripture,
and this means not only the grammatical forms, but also the symbolic
usages of the language.
We have seen that the apocalypses are apt to appear in times of great
calamity, and we have accepted the verdict of later scholarship, that
this Apocalypse of St. John appeared about 68 or 69 A.D. Was this a time
of trouble in that Eastern world? Verily it was; the most appalling hour
perhaps in the world's history. The unspeakable Nero was either still
upon the throne of the Roman Empire, or had just reeled from that
eminence to the doom of a craven suicide. The last years of his life
were gorged with horror. The murder of his brother, the burning of Rome,
probably by his connivance, if not by his command, in order that he
might sate his appetite for sensations upon this horrid spectacle;
following this the fiendish scheme to charge this incendiarism upon the
Christians, and slaughter them by tens of thousands in all the cities of
the Empire,--these are only instances of a career which words are too
feeble to portray. Those who succeeded him in this supreme power were
not much less ferocious; the very name of pity seemed to have been
blotted from the Roman speech; the whole Empire reeked with cruelty and
perfidy. While such men ruled at Rome it could not be supposed that the
imperial representatives in the provinces would be temperate and just.
Some of them, at any rate, had learned the lesson of the hour, and were
as perfidious, as truculent, as base as their master could have wished.
Such a one was that Gessius Floras who was the procurator of Judea, and
who seemed to have exhausted the ingenuity of a malignant nature in
stirring up the Jews to insurrection. By every species of indignity and
cruelty he finally stung the long-suffering people into a perfect fury,
and the rebellion which broke out in Palestine in the year 66 was one of
the most fearful eruptions of human nature that the world has ever seen.
Florus had raised the demon; now the legions of Rome must be called in
to exorcise it. It was a terrible struggle. All the energies of Jewish
fanaticisms were enlisted; the Zealots, the fiercest party among them,
not content with slaughtering their Roman enemies, turned their hands
against every man of their own nation who ventured to question the
wisdom of their desperate resistance. In Jerusalem itself a reign of
terror raged which makes the French Revolution seem in comparison a calm
and orderly procedure.
At the beginning of the outbreak Nero had sent one of his trusted
generals, Vespasian, and Vespasian's son Titus, to put down the
insurrection. Neither of these soldiers was a sentimentalist; both
believed as heartily as did Wentworth in later years that the word of
the hour was Thorough. They started with their armies from Antioch in
March, 67, resolved on sweeping Palestine with the besom of destruction.
Cities and villages, one by one, were besieged, captured, destroyed;
men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The Jewish
army fought every inch of the ground like tigers; but they were
overpowered and beaten in detail, and steadily forced southward.
Blackened walls, pools of blood, and putrefying corpses were all that
the Romans left in their rear; ruthlessly they drove the doomed people
before them toward their stronghold of Jerusalem. In the autumn of that
year Vespasian withdrew his army into winter-quarters, and left the
Zealots in Jerusalem to their orgy of brigandage and butchery. He could
well afford to rest and let them do his deadly work.
In the spring of the following year, the siege of Jerusalem began. The
Christians of the city had fled to Pella, east of the Jordan; the
remnant of the Jews held their sacred heights with the courage of
despair.
It is at this very juncture that this book of the Revelation was
written. John testifies that it was written on Patmos, a desolate islet
of the Ægean Sea, west of Asia Minor, to which he had either been
banished by some tool of Nero, or else had betaken himself for solitude
and reflection. To him, in this retreat, the awful tidings had come of
the scourge that had fallen on the land of his fathers; added to this,
the conflagration at Rome, the Neronian persecution, all the horrors of
the past decade were fresh in his memory. May we not say that the time
was ripe for an apocalyptic message?
It is in these events, then, that we must find the explanation of much
of this symbolical language. Such is the law of the apocalypse, and this
apocalypse may be expected to conform to the law. St. John is instructed
by the angel to write "the things which thou sawest, and the things
which are, and the things which shall come to pass hereafter,"--"the
things which must _shortly_ come to pass," the first verse more
explicitly states. It is the past which he has seen, the present, and
the immediate future with which his visions are concerned. It is not any
attempt to outline the whole course of human history; it is the picture,
in mystic symbols, of the present crisis and of the deliverance which is
to follow it. There is no room here for a commentary on the Apocalypse;
I will only indicate, in a rapid glance, the outline of the book.
The first three chapters are occupied with the epistles to the seven
churches which are in Asia, administering reproof, exhortation, comfort,
and counsel to the Christians in these churches,--faithful, stirring,
persuasive appeals, whose meaning can be easily understood, and whose
truth is often sorely needed by the churches of our own time.
Then begins the proper Apocalypse, with the first vision of the throne
in heaven, and sitting thereon the Lamb that was slain, who is also the
Lion of the tribe of Judah. The book sealed with seven seals is given to
him to open, and the opening of each seal discloses a new vision. The
first seal opened shows a white horse bearing a rider who carries a bow
and wears a crown, and who goes forth conquering and to conquer. This is
the emblem of the Messiah whose conquest of the world is represented as
beginning. But the Messiah once said, "I came not to bring peace, but a
sword," and the consequences of his coming must often be strife and
sorrow because of the malignity of men. And therefore the three seals
which are opened next disclose a fiery horse, the symbol of War, a black
horse, whose rider is Famine, a pale horse in whose saddle is Death. The
opening of the fifth seal shows the martyred multitude before the throne
of God. The sixth discloses the desolation and the ruin taking place
upon the earth. Thus the mighty panorama passes constantly before our
eyes; the confusion, the devastation, the woes, the scourges of mankind
through which Messiah's Kingdom is advancing to its triumph. The seals,
the trumpets, the vials bring before us representations of the
retributions and calamities which are falling upon mankind. Sometimes we
seem to be able to fix upon a historical event which the vision clearly
symbolizes; sometimes the meaning to us is vague; perhaps if we had
lived in that day the allusion would have been more intelligible.
There is, however, one great central group of these visions round about
which the others seem to be arrayed as scenic accessories, whose
interpretation the writer has taken great pains to indicate. These are
the visions found in chapters xii., xiii., xvi., and xvii. The woman,
sun-clad, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars upon
her head (chap, xii.), is beyond all question the ancient Jewish church;
the child which is born to the woman is the Christian church; the great
red dragon that seeks to devour the child is the Satanic power, the
Prince of this world. The Dragon is here on the earth because he has
been expelled from heaven. The war of the Dragon against the woman
indicates the persecutions of the church; the flight of the woman to the
wilderness may symbolize the recent escape of the mother church from
Jerusalem to Pella.
The next vision shows a Beast, coming up out of the sea, with seven
heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten diadems, and on his heads
names of blasphemy. Here we have an instance of that confounding of
symbols, the merging of one in another, which is very common in the
apocalyptic writings. The beast is, primarily, Nero, or the Roman
Empire, as represented by--Nero. The ten horns are the ten chief
provinces; the seven heads are seven emperors. "It is a symbol," says
Dr. Farrar, "interchangeably of the Roman Empire and of the Emperor. In
fact, to a greater degree than at any period of history, the two were
one. Roman history had dwindled down into a personal drama. The Roman
Emperor could say with literal truth, _'L'Etat c'est moi'_. And a
wild beast was a Jew's natural symbol either for a Pagan Kingdom or for
its autocrat." [Footnote: _The Early Days of Christianity_, p.
463.] I can do no better than to repeat to you a small part of Dr.
Farrar's further comment upon this vision.
"This wild beast of Heathen Rome has ten horns, which represent the ten
main provinces of Imperial Rome. It has the power of the Dragon, that
is, it possesses the Satanic dominion of the 'Prince of the power of the
air.'
"On each of its heads is the name of blasphemy. Every one of the seven
Kings, however counted, had borne the (to Jewish ears) blasphemous
surname of Augustus (Sebastos, one to be adored); had received
apotheosis, and been spoken of as _Divine_ after his death; had
been crowned with statues, adorned with divine attributes, had been
saluted with divine titles, and, in some instances, had been absolutely
worshiped, and that in his lifetime....
"The diadems are on the horns, because the Roman _Proconsuls_, as
delegates of the Emperor, enjoy no little share of the Cæsarean
autocracy and splendor, but the name of blasphemy is only on the heads,
because the Emperor alone receives divine honors and alone bears the
daring title of Augustus." [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 464.]
One of the heads of this Beast was wounded to death, but the deadly
wound was healed. It was the universal belief among Pagans and
Christians that the world had not yet seen the last of Nero. Either his
suicide was feigned and ineffectual, and he was in hiding, or else he
would come to life and resume his savage splendors and his gilded
villainies. To make it certain that the writer here refers to this
expectation, we find, in chapter xvii., another reference to the Beast,
which seems at first a riddle, but which is easily interpreted. "The
five are fallen, the one is, the other is not yet come"; "The Beast that
thou sawest was and is not, and is about to come out of the abyss." "The
Beast that was and is not, even he is an eighth, and is of the seven."
The head and the Beast are here identified. The meaning is that five
Roman Emperors are dead, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero;
"one is,"--Galba is now reigning; "the other" (Otho) "is not yet come;"
but he must come soon for Galba is an old man and cannot long survive,
and "the Beast that was and is not,"--Nero,--who is "about to come out
of the abyss,"--to return to life,--"even he is an eighth, and is of
the seven." He is one of the seven, for he was the fifth, and he will be
the eighth. It was the universal Christian belief that Nero, raised from
the dead, would be the future Antichrist, and it is this belief which
the vision reflects. To make the case still clearer the writer gives us,
by the current Hebrew Kabbalistic method, the number of the Beast, that
is to say, the numerical value of his name. Each letter of the old
alphabets has a numerical value. Thus the writer of the Sibyllines
points out the Greek name of Jesus--[Greek: Iesous],--by saying that its whole
number is equivalent to eight units, eight tens, and eight hundreds.
This is the exact numerical value of the six Greek letters composing
the Saviour's name, 10+8+200+70+400+200=888. Precisely so John here
tells us what is the numerical value of the letters in the name of
the Beast. If we tried the Latin or the Greek names of Nero the clue
would not be found; but John was writing mainly for Hebrews, and the
Hebrew letters of _Kesar Neron_, the name by which every Jew knew
this Emperor, amount to exactly 666.
Many other of the features of this veiled description tally perfectly
with the character of this infamous ruler; and when the evidence is all
brought together it seems as though the apostle could scarcely have made
his meaning more obvious if he had written Nero's name in capital
letters.
This is the central vision of the Apocalypse, as I have said; round
about this the whole cyclorama revolves; and it has been the standing
enigma of the interpreters in all the ages. The early church generally
divined its meaning; but in later years the high-soaring exegesis which
has spread this Apocalypse all over the centuries and found in it
prophetic symbols of almost all the events that have happened in
mediæval and modern history, has identified the Beast with countless
characters, among them Genseric, King of the Vandals, Benedict, Trajan,
Paul V., Calvin, Luther, Mohammed, Napoleon. All this wild guessing
arises from ignorance of the essential character and purpose of the
apocalyptical writings.
I can follow this enticing theme no further. Let it suffice to call the
attention of all who desire to reach some sober conclusions upon the
meaning of the book to Archdeacon Farrar's "Early Days of Christianity,"
in which the whole subject is treated with the amplest learning and the
soundest literary judgment.
The Book of Revelation has been, as I have intimated, the favorite
tramping ground of all the hosts of theological visionaries; men who
possessed not the slightest knowledge of the history or the nature of
apocalyptic literature, and whose appetite for the mysterious and the
monstrous was insatiable, have expatiated here with boundless license.
To find in these visions descriptions of events now passing and
characters now upon the stage is a sore temptation. To use these hard
words, the Beast, the Dragon, the False Prophet, as missiles wherewith
to assail those who belong to a school or a party with which you are at
variance, is a chance that no properly constituted partisan could
willingly fore-go. Thus we have seen this book dragged into the
controversies and applied to the events of all the centuries, and the
history of its interpretation is, as one of its interpreters confesses,
the opprobrium of exegesis. But if one ceases to look among these
symbols for a predictive outline of modern history, "a sort of
anticipated Gibbon," and begins to read it in the light of the
apocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him. He will
not be able, indeed, to explain it all; to some of these riddles the
clue has been lost; but, in the words of Dr. Farrar, "he will find that
the Apocalypse is what it professes to be,--an inspired outline of
contemporary history, and of the events to which the sixth decade of the
first century gave immediate rise. He will read in it the tremendous
manifesto of a Christian seer against the blood-stained triumph of
imperial heathenism; a pæan and a prophecy over the ashes of the
martyrs; the thundering reverberations of a mighty spirit struck by the
fierce plectrum of the Neronian persecution, and answering in
impassioned music which, like many of David's Psalms, dies away into the
language of rapturous hope." [Footnote: _Early Days of Christianity_,
p. 429. ]
For we must not forget that this is a song of triumph. This seer is no
pessimist. The strife is hot, the carnage is fearful, they that rise up
against our Lord and his Messiah are many and mighty, but there is no
misgiving as to the event. For all these woes there is solace, after all
these conflicts peace. Even in the midst of the raging wars and
persecutions, the door is opened now and again into the upper realm of
endless joy and unfading light. And he "whose name is called The Word of
God," upon whose garment and whose thigh the name is written, "King of
Kings and Lord of Lords," will prevail at last over all his foes. The
Beast and the Dragon, and the False Prophet and the Scarlet Woman (the
harlot city upon her seven hills whose mystic name is Babylon) will all
be cast into the lake of fire; then to the purified earth the New
Jerusalem shall come down out of heaven from God. This is the emblem and
the prophecy, not of the city beyond the stars, but of the purified
society which shall yet exist upon the earth,--the fruition of his work
who came, not to judge the world, but to save the world. It is on these
plains, along these rivers, by these fair shores that the New Jerusalem
is to stand; it is not heaven; it is a city that comes down out of
heaven from God. No statement could be more explicit. The glorious
visions which fill the last chapters of this wonderful book are the
promise of that "All hail Hereafter," for which every Christian patriot,
every lover of mankind, is always looking and longing and fighting and
waiting. And he who, by the mouth of this seer, testifieth the words
of the prophecy of this book saith, "Yea, I come quickly. Even so, come,
Lord Jesus."