light of a providential bulwark, it is not surprising that John’s Apocalypse had a hard struggle to retain its place in the canon, and that except in times of sore persecution it did not appeal to the majority of Christians. The result was that before very long the only means of preserving it for ecclesiastical edification was to alle- gorise it freely. This naturally threw the interpretation of the book quite out of focus, so that the fortunes of the Apocalypse really form a chapter in the history of the canon or of the church (cf. Liicke, §§ 30-36, 50-59). But even prior to, or independent of, the allegorical interpretation, the book had vitality. It is paradoxical to claim that the apocalypses of the early church, including that of John, were the first Christian scriptures to be canonised, owing to their prophetic origin, which ranked them with the O.T. Their place in the series of prophetic writings is obvious, but the treatise de aleatoribus, from which the main evidence for this theory is drawn, is of too uncertain a date to be used safely in this connexion, Still, the Apocalypse did retain its vogue in many circles of the early church, especially throughout the west. Often this was due to a vague and correct instinct for John’s great religious message in spite of its archaic paraphernalia and its fantastic elements (cf. Renan, 479, 480). Yet even its literal prophecies still maintained an appeal of their own. It was the chiliasm of the book, not its unfulfilled predictions, which proved a difficulty. The prediction which went soonest out of date (ἱ.ε., xvii. 8-11) seems to have occasioned as little trouble to the church as the Sibyiline oracles or the similar passages of the O.T. prophets. The Apocalypse evidently was not final any more than normal.’ Besides, against the failure of its historical programme to correspond with the subsequent trend of history, must be set the fact that the num- ber of the Beast could be interpreted as Trajan, Hadrian, or Marcus Aurelius, that the expectation? of a Nero-antichrist lingered down to the fifth century in certain corners of the popular religious mind, that Gog and Magog were repeatedly expected in the form of savage hordes (Huns, Goths, etc.), and that the dread (cf. Lightfoot’s Ignatius, i., 644 f.) of a Parthian invasion did not become obsolete till the third century. In several respects the book could still be taken reasonably as a prediction of near events. Thus, by the time that Constantine’s policy had antiquated the Apocalypse’s view of
1Cf. A. B. Davidson on this point in Hastings, D.B., i. 736, 737, iv. 126.
2 Though “it was during the continuance of the Flavian dynasty that the ex- pectation was at white heat,” yet it ‘lingered on for many centuries” (Lightfoot, Clem. Rom., ii., pp. 511, 512).