§ 7. The Date-—When the motive of the Apocalypse is thus found in the pressure upon the Christian conscience exerted by Domitian’s emphasis of the imperial cultus, especially as that was felt in Asia Minor, any earlier date for the book becomes almost impossible (cf. Mommsen’s Provinces of Rom. Empire, ii.175f.). The ‘traditional alternative, 1.ο., the reign of Claudius, is absurd. The Neronic date (1.6., soon after Nero’s death) exerts most of its fasci- nation on those who cling to too rigid a view of the book’s unity, which prevents them from looking past passages like xi. 1 f. and xvii. 9 f. But (a) the phase of the Nero-redivivus myth which is represented in the Apocalypse cannot be earlier than at least the latter part of Ves- ‘pasian’s reign ; (b) the church of Smyrna, as we know from Polycarp (ad Phil. xi.) was not founded by 64 a.p., and it is impossible to crush the development implied in ii. 8-11 into a few years; (c) the con- ‘ception of the new Jerusalem implies a post-70 date (cf. notes on Xxi.-xxii.) ; (4) no worship of the emperor, adequate to explain the data of the Apocalypse, was enforced under Nero; and (e) the allusions to the martyrs (ii. 13, and especially vi. 10-11—the How long ? of the Neronic victims, and their subsequent comrades in martyrdom) surely presuppose a much longer period than three or four years. For recent English statements of the Neronic date, see Selwyn (pp. 215 f.) and Mr. Β. W. Henderson (of. cit. pp. 439 f.). ‘The Vespasianic date (cf. V. Bartlet, Apostolic Age, 388-408 ; Scott, 48-56), which has rather a better case in the internal evidence of the ‘book, is ruled out of court by (d). The lack of any traditional re- ference to persecution under this emperor would not indeed be a decisive argument by itself; it is only by the letters of Pliny that we happen to know anything of the troubles experienced by Asiatic Christians under Trajan, and a similar outburst under Vespasian might have passed unnoticed by Christian or pagan writers. But this is unlikely! In any case, Vespasian did not take his inherited and official divinity seriously. Christians had a temporary and com- parative immunity under him, and “so rapidly did their influence grow that they even made converts in the imperial family itself” (cf. Lightfoot, Clem. Rom. ii. 507). Parts of the Apocalypse, taken ‘singly (e.g., in xiii.), might be referred to Vespasian’s reign, but, ‘unlike Domitian, he does not seem to have interfered with Oriental
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1 An even stronger term might be used, in view of the researches by critics like Matthaei, Gsell, Neumann and Ramsay. The extreme unlikelihood of the Apoca- lypse being elicited by anything during the reigns of Titus or Vespasian is also recog- nised by Linsenmayer in his Bekampfung des Christentums durch den rémischen Staat (1905), pp. 66 f.