But his use of Daniel especially is more than that of a littérateur veproducing impressive and poetic conceptions from the study of a classic. For all the artistic and even artificial literary shape of the book, we should weigh it in the wrong scales were we to esti- mate it as the work of an author who simply drew upon such earlier models for his own later purposes. As contemporary rabbis not only pondered over passages like the Egyptian plagues, the prophecy of Gog and Magog, and the opening vision of Ezekiel, but even had ecstatic visions of heaven granted them (cf. R. $., 350, 379), so the prophet John was not a mere literary artist or a student of prophecy or an editor of earlier fragments. He was that, but he was more. Two features of his book differentiate him from such a class of writers ; (a) he was a prophet in his own way, and (0) his conscious- ness had been so powerfully affected by the post-exilic Judaism, as well as by contemporary beliefs, that it is not possible to derive his conceptions exclusively from those of the canonical Old Testament.} These two features partially coalesce. As a prophet, no less than as a student of the prophetic and apocryphal scriptures, John be- lieved that the predictions of Daniel were at last on the point of being fulfilled. This was the assurance which dominated his whole treat- ment of the O.T. in general. It explains how he appropriated and applied time-honoured messianic predictions which he considered relevant to Jesus the true messiah, and it also serves to account psychologically for the form of several visions (e.g., that of ch. i.), which imply a mind already brooding over some of these passages. A well-known instance of this suggestion of visions occurs in Ter- tullian’s De anima, ix.: ‘‘Est hodie soror apud nos reuelationum charismata sortita, quas in ecclesia inter dominica sollemnia per
(1897), pp. 60 f. (p. 68: bei Amos drangt ein Lebendiges zum Lichte, bei Sacharja herrscht das Programm). On Ezekiel as a prophet who foretold the coming of Christ, cf. Clem. Rom., xvii. 1. The typical and eschatological significance of the Egyptian plagues especially seems, from Irenzus (iv. 27, 28), to have impressed the Asiatic πρεσβύτεροι.
1 The author knows the Hebrew original as well as the LXX (or, at any rate, some of his sources do), but the LXX quotations, or rather references (Swete, pp. cxxxv.-cxlviii.) and reminiscences—for no formula of citation occurs—occasionally (cf. i. 7, ix. 20, x. 6, xii. 7, xiii. 7, xix. 6, xx. 4, 11) mark a deliberate divergence, not unexampled in the N.T., towards what was apparently a pre-Christian Greek version of the Hebrew, approximating to the version of Theodotion (particularly in Daniel). They thus anticipate the later preference of writers like Origen for the Theodotionic Daniel (cf. Salmon’s Introd. to N.T., pp. 547 f., and Swete’s Introd. to the Ο.Τ. in Greek, pp. 46f.), or else they prove that he was translating directly from the Hebrew text (so e.g. ini. 6, xi. 4?, xiv. 8,18). For instances of composite Ο.Τ. reminiscences
cf. Selwyn, pp. 62-64.