other things which could only have been taught and learned within the school of Jesus Christ, and these are really the telling sentences throughout the book.
At the same time it must be remembered that some of the very features which have lost much if not all of their significance for later ages, ornate and cryptic expressions, allusions to coeval hopes and superstitions, grotesque fantasies and glowing creations of an oriental imagination, the employment of current ideas about anti- christ, calculations of the immediate future, and the use of a re- ligious or semi-mythical terminology which was evidently familiar to some Asiatic Christians in the first century—these more or less ephemeral elements combined to drive home the message of the book. They signify to us the toll which had to be paid to contem- porary exigencies; without them the book could not have made its way at all into the conscience and imagination of its audi- ence. The momentum of its message lay, however, in the deep sincerity and lofty outlook of the prophet himself, and this broke out occasionally in passages of unexampled splendour and dignity. Sublimity, as a contemporary critic of literary style observed (Pseudo-Longinus, περὶ tous), has always a moral basis; it is, he declared, the echo of a great soul (µεγαλοφροσύνης ἀπήχημα)---ο5, we might add, of a great soul exercised upon a great issue. The same critic makes another remark, which is apposite to a passage like ch. xviii. of the Apocalypse. One avenue to sublimity, he notes, lies through imitation of and devotion to great writers of an earlier age: Ἔστι δὲ οὗ κλοπὴ τὸ πρᾶγμα, GAN ὡς ἀπὸ καλῶν εἰδῶν ἢ πλασμάτων ἢ δημιουργηµάτων ἀποτύπωσις. This canon throws a ray of light upon the special psychological problem of the Apocalypse’s relation to its Ο.Τ. and extra-canonical models. Some great writers in every period of literature are only to be understood in the light of a long series of predecessors, and the prophet John is one ofthese. His apocalypse in one aspect is the final and brilliant flash of the red light which had gleamed from Amos down to the Maccabees. His affinities in point of form, treatment, and general aim are with the line of literary prophets who, from Ezekiel to the authors of Daniel, 4th Esdras, and Baruch, applied themselves to the statement and restatement of apocalyptic eschatology. John’s Apocalypse is flecked with allusions to Ezekiel, Zechariah,! and above all Daniel.
1 In two aspects John resembles his prototype Zechariah: (a) in the employ- ment of an intricate symbolism, which makes it difficult to be sure where intuition ends and literary decoration begins, (0) in the use of schematism to explain provi- dence. For the latter, cf. Giesebrecht’s Die Berufsgabung der alttest. Propheten