tianity imperatively demands for 1 Peter a later date than Α.Ρ. 64”; and from it he deduces the corollary: “The later date renders it very probable that Babylon is employed figuratively for Rome, ac- cording to Rev. xiv. 8, xvi. 19, xvii. 5, xviii. 2, 10, 21”.
Professor Cone’s corollary deserves attention. He seems to assume that the Christians started afresh—de novo or ex nihilo—to evolve modes and idioms of thought for themselves. Such an as- sumption is demonstrably untenable. In the particular case of such cipher-language as this, it is certain that the Christians appropriated the inventions of the Jews, who in their own oppressions and their own persecutions had BG Bip to veil their hopes from all but the initiated. Babylon was the great and typical oppressor, and her successors in the part naturally received her proper name. Rome ‘was not the declared and inflexible enemy of the Jewish nation as a whole before the time of Caligula; but Rome stood behind Herod the Great, and Pompey had desecrated the Temple at Jerusalem. Philo might forgive and forget the outrages which Pompey and Herod had perpetrated in order to heighten the enormity of Caligula’s offences, but the Psalms of Solomon and the evidence of Josephus suffice to prove that for some Rome was already the enemy in the last century B.c. Pormal proof that the Jews actually spoke of Rome by the name of Babylon before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 is, indeed, wanting. But the identification of Rome with Babylon and the consequent transference of the paraphernalia of Babylon to Rome is part and parcel of the apocalyptic vocabulary and passed over into the language of the Rabbis. The author of the Epistle had no more need to explain his use of Babylon than had the Jewish poet who wrote in the name of the Sibyl and said in reference to Nero :—
‘Poets shall mourn for thee, thrice-hapless Greece, What time the mighty king of mighty Rome, Coming from Italy, shall pierce thine Isthmus— A God-like mortal, born (they say) of Zeus By lady Hera, who with dulcet songs Shall slay his hapless mother and many more. A shameless prince and terrible! He shall fly ͵ From Babylon...” }
And again he prophesied that after a time and times and half a time?
1Oracula, Sibyllina, v. 137-143 (Geffcken: Leipzig, 1902). ITbid. 154: "ἐκ τετράτου éreos”” ; compare Daniel vii. 25.