The Pulpit Commentary — John — Volume 1 — Section 70

endravoured to show that none but a Hebrew, a Pale.~tinian Jew, could hl\ve written the Gospel, so that the presence of Hrbrew idcns in the Apocalypse creates I\ bond ol union between the two documents rather than the reverse. Let tho following points be;(noticed: "t•o•u8a, Bav&Tov, in eh. viii. 52, and n,µoia 1tal Tlpan, eh. iv. 48; ucf>pa"tl,m in _the sense of ratifying and approving (eh. iii. 33); d lpxo,11 -rou 1t&uµov (eh. xii. 31; xn. 11, etc.). The Apocalypse commences with a. Christophany, corresponding with the thC'Ophimies of Isa. vi. and Ezek. i. and x., and proceeds throughout its visions to vindicate the stupendous claims of the Lord who liveth and wns dead, until the final victory <1f the Lamb is consummated in a. purified city, of which the Lord Almighty a □ d the Lamb are the Temple and the Light,, But the Gospel begins in eternity, and makes the eternal (h&-yos) "Word" the sublime background for all tho ma.nifestntion in the fle~h. Among the earlie.~t claims which the Gospel makes for the incarnate God is this-be is the Lamb of God taking away sin, the link between heaven and earth the Bridegroom of the Church; One greater than the temple, he promises to erect a~ eternal temple should the first be destroyed. The Lnmb of the Apocalypse, throuuh cndle.~s conflict with evil, first from the Jews, then from the world, then from the centralized world-power, passes to his "Hallelujah," and wipes away tears from o.lf a.U faces. In the Gospel, the great powers elsewhere seen in Apocalyptic vision come face to face with the historic Christ; through warfare and death he gains a real victory over priest and procurator, betrayer and murderer, and proceeds to wipe away tears from off all faces, to conquer death aud Hades, and to confer an eternal life. The Hebraism of both documents is conspicuous, but that of the one is not more abundant than is that of the other. While the Gospel opens the kingdom of God to all believers, and speaks of "the other sheep," and the time when "neither in Gerizim nor yet in Jerusalem shall men worship the Father," the same grand universalism pervades the Apocalypse, which sees the great multitude gathered out of every kindred, e.Dd nation, and people, and tongue, which no man can number, and admits all the (l81'7!) nations into the eternal light of the new and heavenly Jerusalem. This Judaism, or Hebraism, in the two documents finds such a strong and coincident expression, that, so far from separating the authorship, it does much to establish identity of origin. (ii.) The following grammatical peculiarities of the Apocalypse deserve close observation. (a) Cases offal,se apposition. Some of the most obvious ones are derived from our not perceiving that the clause thus charged is a parenthetical one. Rev. i. 5, 'A1rl> 'I11uou XpUTTou, t, ,,_&.pn,s, etc.,•• From Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness." In the previous verse a false regimen is said to be signal evidence that the apocalyptist defied all gram- matical rules: 'Arb t, &11 1tal d ~" teal d lpx&,,.•vos, This cannot prove that the writer does not know the syntax of the preposition cl1rb, seeing that thirty places occur in which he uses it with perfect correctness. The explanation of the peculiarity is that he is, in this place, merely translating the incommunicable name of" Jehovah" into Greek, and re!rardincr the phrase as one indeclinable noun. The ;, >•-'"tovua of Rev. ii. 20, which is the te~t prefurred by the R.T., is clearly a relative clause, the nominative preferred in virtue- of the finite verbs which follow. Similiar peculiarities are found in Plato's 'Euthrypho,' p. 32 (see Winer, 671, Eng. trans.); see also ~v. v_. 11,. etc., ~here the construction is peculiar in a like respect. But so far from its berng m1poss1Lle Greek, examples are given from Plato, Thucydides, .Achilles Tat., and others. There a.re curious combinations of nominatives and accusatives in Rev. iv. 2-4; xiv. 14; vii. 9; following .~o" ""l l5o6; but there is this peculiarity, that the nomina- tives follow the l5ov, and the accusatives come more under the power of th<l preceding .uo.,, The (Rev. viii. 8, 9) -rcl txo,,n ,f,11xds, introduced to diecrirnir,ate nluµa-ra, "which have life," from those which have it not, becomes a parenthetical sentence (cf. here ~~~ . . Anomalies of gender and number are to be explained by the ·&trong poetic tempera- ment which tends to give masculine or feminine characteristics to the neuter noun. Rev. ii. 27, where (6111/ are referred to as aMo6s; but precisely the same thing is seen in Matt. xxviil. 19; Gal. iv. 19; ;,,,1,/J-IZ.,... are referred to as ai,ot in Rev. xix. 14;. tTTpaTE6µa-ra are 1.,a.511>'.lva,. 'l'he peculiarity is by no means soleciijtic; it is found in the Gospel and in numerous Greek writers. The critics have enumerated sund1y  'fllE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOU :-I. lxxvii