spirit was no longer present in the church. The amount of ante- dated prediction in the Apocalypse (.e., in xiii. xvii.), too, is barely adequate, of itself, to support this theory. And it may be argued that a pseudonymous writer would probably have been more ex- plicit upon the apostolic authority of John, 7.e., if John the apostle was the John under whose name he issued the Apocalypse. The case for the latter form of the hypothesis would be strengthened, of course, if it could be shown, as many critics have recently attempted to prove, that the tradition of John’s early martyrdom is reliable. In any case the ardent and even vindictive spirit of the Apocalypse is not to be connected necessarily with Luke ix. 55. Such a passionate, unpatriotic temper would be as much due to the apocalyptic traditions and to the local exigencies of the period as to any personal idiosyncracy, and if John retained this feeling till the end of the century, or even till the seventh or eighth decade, he must have profited very little by the lesson which Jesus had read him long ago. When he is connected with the tradition or author- ship of the Fourth gospel, the supposition that he was responsible for the attitude of the Apocalypse becomes doubly, trebly difficult.
Το sum up. The Apocalypse was a product of the ‘‘ Johannine” school or circle in Asia Minor, towards the close of the first century. Beyond the disjunctive canon that it was not composed by the author of the Fourth Gospel, but that it may have been written by the presbyter whose name appears in the address of 2 and 3 John, we can hardly go, in our comparison of the Johannine writings. The data of tradition are unfortunately ambiguous and contradic- tory, but, whether or not the son of Zebedee resided in Asia Minor, the presbyter John seems on the whole to suit the require- ments of the Apocalypse better than any other contemporary figure, and, unless we are content with Castellio and others to share the pious reticence of Dionysius (ὅτι μὲν οὖν Ἰωάννης ἐστὶν 6 ταῦτα γράφων, αὐτῷ λέγοντι πιστευτέον * ποῖος δὲ οὗτος, ἄδηλον), the balance of probability is in favour either of pseudonymity or of the hypothesis that the prophet John who composed the Apocalypse was the presbyter John of early Christian tradition (so after Dionysius, from various stand- points,! Eichhorn, Wittichen, De Wette, Mangold, Credner, Bleek, Ewald, Keim, Havet, Diisterdieck, Selwyn, Erbes, O. Holtzmann, Harnack, Kohler, Von Soden, Heinrici (Das Urchristenthum, 1902, 126 f.), and Von Dobschitz (Probleme d. apost. Zeitalters, 1904, si 5].
1 Grotius: ‘‘ Credo autem presbytero, apostoli discipulo, custoditum hunc librum ; 3nde factum, ut eius esse opus a quibusdam per errorem crederetur”. Loisy (1