suggests, it was more precise and extended. It was held by Hip- polytus, Clement of Alexandria, Jerome, and Victorinus, possibly even by Hegesippus at an earlier date, if Dr. Lawlor is correct in his argument (¥ourn. Theol. Studies, viii. 436 f.) that the statements of Eusebius (H. Ε. iii. 11-20) were borrowed from that writer's Hypom- nemata ; indeed, no other early tradition has anything like the same support or plausibility. Irenaeus, of course, is no great authority by himself on matters chronological, but he is reporting here what there was no obvious motive for inventing. The internal and the externa! evidence thus converge upon the latter part of the reign of Domitian as the period of the book’s composition or publication. Little more than half a century later, one of its first commentators, bishop Melito of Sardis, protested to Marcus Aurelius that “ of all the emperors it was Nero and Domitian alone who, at the instigation of certain slanderous persons,” assailed the Christian church (so Lact. De Morte Persec. 3). Whether Melito knew this indepen- dently of the Apocalypse or not, we need have very little hesita- tion (cf. Stephan Gsell’s Essai sur le régne de l’Empereur Domitien, 1894, pp. 307 f.) in collating this persecution with the book in question.
§ 8. The Author—tThe settlement of the date clears up the problem of the authorship to this extent, that it confirms the disjunctive canon of Dionysius (cf. Liicke, § § 39-42; Simcox xxiii. f. xxxiii. f.), Origen’s thoughtful pupil, who saw, upon grounds of internal evidence, that it was impossible for the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel to have come from the same pen. Were the Apocalypse dated earlier, it could be supposed that John had matured during the interval, since twenty or twenty-five years’ residence in a Greek city might be conjectured to have improved his style and widened his outlook. But when the Apocalypse has to be dated in the same decade as the Fourth Gospel, the hypothesis of a single author collapses. While the data of vocabulary, style, and thought suggest that both writings originated in a school or circle of Asiatic Christians, they differentiate the one book from the other unambiguously.!
Hardly any writing in the New Testament loses so little, or gains so much, by translation as the Apocalypse, for almost any version
1 Recent, though rather extreme, statements are to be found in J. Réville’s Le Quatr. Evangile (1901), pp. 26-47, 333 f. in Selwyn (pp. 81 f. 114 Ε., 222 f., 258 f., the Fourth Gospel = a correction not only of the synoptists but of the Apocalypse), and in Schmiedel’s article (Ε.Β. ii. ii. 2515-2518). As Alford admits, “‘the Greek of the Gospel and Epistle is not that of the Apocalypse in a maturer state”.