impending judgment as external, the Gospel as spiritual. The Apocalypse describes the triumph of Christianity under the imagery of Judaism; the consummation being an ideal Jer- usalem and an ideal worship; while in the Gospel, Judaism appears in opposition to Christ, “standing without, isolated and petrified, and not taken up with it, quickened and glori- fied.”
The symbols of the book are drawn from objects familiar to the writer—the locusts, the eagles, the millstone, the olive and palm and vine.
The principal objection urged against the common author- ship of the Gospel and the Apocalypse, is the difference in language and style. This difference must be frankly admitted. “The language,” says Dr. Davidson, “ departs materially from the usual Greek of the New Testament, presenting anomalies, incorrectnesses, peculiar constructions, and awkward disposi- tions of words, which have no parallel. . . . The lan- guage is so thoroughly Hebraistic as to neglect the usual rules of Greek.” By many eminent critics these differences are re- garded as irreconcilable on the assumption of a common au- thorship.
On the other hand, it may be urged that these differences are largely intentional; that the author departs from common usage under the peculiar demands of his subject, arising from the conditions under which he writes, and his intent to con- form to the Old Testament style of address; and further, that his familiarity with correct usage is shown by other passages in the same book. The Apocalypse, moreover, contains many of the words which are peculiar to the Gospel and Epistles, such as to witness, to tabernacle, to keep, to overcome, to name as the expression of character, true (addnIuvés) in the sense of real; and the figures of hungering and thirsting, the manna, the living water, the shepherd and the sheep. It is, indeed, an- swered that, where the same words occur, they are used in a different sense; but many of these alleged differences disap- pear upon closer examination. The Hebrew character is only superficially different from that of the Gospel, which is Hebrew in spirit, though the Greek is much purer, and “the absence