wearisome and fantastic calculations, their tasteless and repulsive elements, and the turgid rhetoric which frequently submerges their really fine conceptions, the Apocalypse of John reveals itself as a superior plant. Its very omissions are significant. There is no allusion, ο.σ., to the prevalent category of the two gons, or to the return of the ten tribes, or to the contemporary Jewish wail over the cessation of sacrifice after A.p. 70 (e.g. in Apoc. Bar. x. 10), or to the martyrs’ death as expiatory (cf. 2 Macc. vii. 37 f.,4 Macc. vi. 29, xvii. 21, etc.), or to any intercession of the prophet on behalf of the church (cf. 4 Esdras viii.). There is no cosmogony, no self-satisfied comparison of God’s people with pagans, no reference to the law! (in contrast to: the contemporary glorification, ¢.g., in 4 Esdras iii.-ix., Apoc. Bar. xv.-Ixix. [cf. Charles’ note on xv. 5], where it rivals even the messiah as a medium of fellowship and a nucleus of future bliss). There are no parables (as in 4th Esdras) or allegories; above all, there are no querulous complaints from the living. Carlyle describes the Girondist pamphlets as far too full of long-drawn out ejaculations, ‘* Woe is. me, and cursed be ye!” Even 4 Esdras, for all its noble pathos, partakes of this self-pity and fury; it is half-anger and half-agony. But the Apocalypse of John usually breathes another air, mitigating upon the whole the brusque temper of its class. Though the oppres- sion which makes a wise man mad may also make a good man sad, for all the feelings of exasperation and indignation stirred by the empire, the prophet John has not yielded to any pessimism about the cause of God. He never attempts to justify the ways of God, like his Jewish contemporaries, or to explain how the devil gave his power to the beast. His faith in Jesus as the messiah inspires a simple hope which enables him to remain unintimidated by the last threats. and terrors of a foe whose end is near. The quarrel with Rome, e.g., is God’s affair. His people have merely to stand still and witness their enemy’s rout.
It is this faith, this Christian consciousness, with its moral steadi- ness, which differentiates John’s Apocalypse from the other members of its class. To write an apocalypse meant, like the composition of a drama or a sonnet, conformity to certain literary rules or standards as well as approximation toa certain spiritandtemper. It justified, if it did not necessitate, the use of earlier fragments, which were only partially intelligible, since the agony of their hour had long passed by. Apocalyptic modified and adapted suck sources to the needs of a later generation.. There was a sequacity about apocalyptic
1 This is all the more remarkable as contemporary Christians were being led, for- ethical reasons, to view their religion more and more from a nomistic standpoint.