Who was this John? Was he some otherwise unknown figure (ἄλλον τινα τῶν ἐν "Agia γενοµένων, Dionysius) in the primitive church of Asia Minor (so e.g., J. Reville, F. C. Porter, Jiilicher)? This is possible, for the name was common enough. But, if it is felt that the work must be connected with a more authoritative personality, tradition offers us the choice of three figures. (a) That of John Mark (so e.g., Hitzig, Weisse, and Hausrath), whom Dionysius of Alexandria mentions in this connection but only to set aside on the score of his un-Asiatic career, need not be seriously discussed, though Beza favoured his claims (‘quod si liceret ex stylo con- jecturam facere, nemini certe potius quam Marco tribuerim qui et ipse Johannes dictus est”). The real alternative lies between (b) John the son of Zebedee, and (c) John the presbyter, both of whom have strong traditional claims. The latter is not to be emended out of existence by any manipulation of the text of Papias, and we have no reason to regard the one as the doppelganger of the other. Whether Eusebius was right in arguing from that text or from other evidence that Papias was one of his hearers, John 6 πρεσβύτερος was an important Christian disciple ; his authority was so great that he could be called 6 πρεσβύτερο without any further designation. There is strong and early support for (b) in tradition, but the in- ternal evidence, as we have seen, is at best neutral and in certain lights unfavourable. It is impossible here to analyse that tradition in its bearings upon the Apocalypse, but it may be said that there were special reasons which contributed to its popularity (cf. § 9). Internal evidence weighed less with the early church than other considera- tions. The wavering position of the Apocalypse required nothing short of apostolic sanction to keep it within the canon, and indeed apostolic authorship came more and more to be tantamount to inspiration. Under these circumstances it was not easy for any theory or tradition of unapostolic authorship to keep its footing. Mr. Conybeare puts this succinctly (The Armenian Text of Revelation, pp. 161 f.): “ Between 350 and 450 Greek texts of Revelation were rare in the Eastern half of the empire. The best minds of the Greek Church, men such as Eusebius Pamphili and Dionysius of Alexandria, denied its Johannine authorship. Living in an age when
sometimes it is not fanciful to trace a special significance in some conventional phrase, ¢.g., the boom of the Mediterranean in i. 15, or in vi. 15-16—an allusion to the Sipylus range, north of the Gulf of Smyrna, where cisterns and holes cut in the rocks afforded temporary shelter to the population during the frequent panics caused by earthquakes on the coast (cf. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Phrygia, Eng. tr., 1892, pp. 61-62).
νο ν. 2Ι