IV. Author and Date. — The greatest divergency of opinion prevails on this subject. Tlie author lias suc- cessively been described as a true prophet wlio lived B.C. 336; an impostor who flourished A.D. 160; a Jew, a Christian, a converted Jew, and as a Monta- nist. The whole complexion of the book, however, incontestably shows that the author of it was a Jew, His personating Ezra, the contempt and vengeance which he breathes against the Gentiles (vi, 50, 57), the intense love he manifests for the Jews, who alone know the Lord and keep his precepts (iii, 30-36), de- claring that for them alone was this world created (iv, 63, 66 ; vi, 55, 59 ; vii, 10, 11), and reserving all the blessings of salvation for them (vii, 1-13); his view of righteousness, which consists in doing the v orks of the law, and that the righteous are justitied and re- warded for their good works (viii, 33, 36) ; the purport of liis questions, referring exclusively to the interests of this people (iv, 35 ; vi, 59) ; the Hagadic legends about the Behemoth and Leviathan which are reserved for the great Messianic feast (vi, 49-52) ; the ten tribes (xiii, 39-47) ; the restoration of tlie Scriptures and the writing of cabbalistic boolvS for the sages or rabbins of Israel (xiv, 20-22, 37-47) — all this proves beyond doubt that the writer was a thorough Hebrew. Chap- ters i, ii, XV, and xvi, which contain allusions to the N. T, (compare i, 30 with Matt, xxxiii, 37-39; ii, 11 with Euke xvi, 9 ; ii, 12 with I!ev. xxii, 2 ; xv, 8 with Rev. vi, 10; xvi, 29 with Matt, xxxiv, 10; xvi, 42- 44 with 1 Cor. vii, 29), and especially the anti-Jewish spirit by which tliey are pervaded, as well as the name of Jesus in ch. viii, 28, which have been the cause why some have maintained that this book is the production of a Christian, are now generally acknowledged to be later interpolations made by some Christian. (See above, sect, iii.)
As to the date of the boolt, the limits within which opinions vary are narrower than in the case of the boolv of Enoch. Liicke (Versuch einer vollst. Einl. etc.,' ed. 2, i, 209) places it in tlie time of Caesar ; Van der Vlis (Disput. crif. 1. c.) shortly after the death of Cse- sar. Laurence (I. e.) brings it down somewhat lower, to B.C. 28-25, and Ililgeiifeld (.Ind. Apol-r. p. 221) agrees witli this conclusion, though he arrives at it by very different reasoning. On tlie other hand, (ifrorer (Jahrh. d. IleiLf, i, 69 sq.) assigns the book to the time o^ Domitian, and in this he is followed by Wieselcr and by Bauer (Liicke, p. 189 sq.), while Liicke, in his first edition, had regarded it as the work of a Hellenist of the time of Trajan. The interpretation of the details of the vision of the eagle, which furnishes the chief data for determining the time of its composition, is ex- tremely uncertain, from the difficulty of regarding the
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history of tlic period from the point of view of the au- thor ; and this dithcuUy is increased by the allusion to the desolation of Jerusalem, w'''^''' '"^y ^^ nierelj' sug- gested by the circumstances of Ezra, the imaginarj' author ; or, on the contrary, the last destruction of Je- rusalem may have suggested Ezra as the medium of the new revelation. (Comp. Fabricius, Cod. Pseudep. ii, p. 189 sq., and Liicke, p. 187, n., sq., for a summary of the earlier opinions on the composition of the book.) But no two expositors agree in their explanation of the vision in ch. xi and xii, and every one finds in the "three heads," the ''twelve feathered wings," and the "eight counter-feathers" such emperors, kings, and demagogues as will square with his preconceived notions as to what they shall describe. So, fOr instance, the learned Whiston makes the three heads to mean the kingdom of France since Francis the Great, A.D. 1515 : of Spain since Ferdinand, the author of the In- quisition, A.D. 1-168; and the house of Austria since the emperor Albert, A.D. 1438 — all of whom persecuted the Protestants {Authen. Records, i, 81). The safest and most satisfactoyy data for determining its age are — 1. The quotations from it in the epistle of St. Barna- bas (ch. xii with 2 Ezra v, 3) and in Clemens Alexan- drinus {Strom, iii, 10), showing beyond doubt that the book was well known at the commencement of the Christian jera, and must therefore have been written some time before to have oljtained such general cur- rency and acceptance ; and, 2. The minute description which the writer gives of the pre-existence and death of the Messiah (vii, 29; xiv, 7), such as no Jew would have given at the very outset of Christianity, to which we have traced the book, when these very points were the stumbling-block to the ancient people, and formed the points of contest between Judaism and Christian- ity, thus showing that it must have been written be- fore Christ. We may therefore safely assign it to about B.C. 50.
But, while the date of the book must be left unde- termined, there can be no doubt that it is a genuine product of Jewish thought. Weisse {Evcmgellenfrage, p. 222) alone dissents on this point from the unanimous judgment of recent scholars (Hilgenfeld, p. 190 sq.); and the contrast between the tone and style of the Christian interpolations and the remainder of the book is in itself sufficient to prove the fact. The Apoca- lypse was probably written in Egypt ; the opening and closing chapters certainly were.