him. .Archdeacon Lee, fo-r instance, in the ' Speaker's Commentary,• p. 415, goes so far as to say that " the tyrant " could be no other than Domitia.n.. But when we reflect that Domitian's death did not take place till September, 96, and that it is highly improbable that St. John outlived the first century, we feel that it is impossible to compress the events of the foregoing narrative into the short intervening space of three or at the most four years-to say nothing of the difficulty of believing that St. John, in such extreme old age as he must have attained at the time of Domitian's death, could have com- menced and earned on the active life which we have abundant reason for supposing he spent at Ephesus, even if we set aside the story of hie riding on horseback into the mountains after the guerilla captain. If, therefore, Eo.sebius was right (as he probably was) in placing the long stay of St. John at Ephesus after hi.a e~ile in Patmos, we hold that he must have been mistaken in supposing that "the tyrant" mentioned by Clement was Domitian. We differ so completely from Archdeacon Lee on this point, that we avow our conviction that "the tyrant" must be so-me other than Domitian. And any schoolboy would perceiv~ the fitness of the designation a.e applied to Nero, so proverbial for cruel tyranny, and so terrible a persecutor of the Christians. He died in the year 68, and we quite believe that lie was the tyrant referred to by_ Clement. This would allow a period of about thirty years for the apostle's subsequent life and work in and around Ephesus, and some such period seems required by evidpnce derived from other sources and by the probabilities of the case. (2) Tertullian is constantly assooi&ted ~th Irenmus and Clem,_ent of Alexandria-he completes the trio of eminent contemporaries whose works have in considerable bo.lk been preserved to us from the latter years of the second century. In a famous passage (' De Praiser. Hmr.,' 36) he speaks of Rome as the place H ubi Petro.s passioni Dominicm a.daequa.tur; ubi Pao.Ins Joannis exitu coronatur; ubi .A.postolns Joanni!S, postea qu.am in oleom ignenm demerso.e nihil passus est, in insulam relegatur"...,..."-where Peter suffered a death like ou-r Lord's; where Paul was beheaded like John the Baptist; and where the Apostle John, after being plunged. into burning-hot oil without being hurt, was banished to an ·island." We are quite willing to concede that this passage proves nothing u to the date of the Apocalypse, but we claim that it lends more support to the earlier than to the later of the alternative dates proposed. For, in the first place, it closely associates the banishment of St. John with the deaths of St. Peter and St. Paul, who are gene.rally believed to have suffered martyrdom under Nero. And secondly, it expressly states that the banishment of St. John took place at R,ome, which answers one objection made against the earlier date, viz. that the Neronian persecution was confined ~ Rome. Tertullian's view, whether ri_ght or wrong, seems to have been that St. John was once at Rome; that there he was accused, tried, &nd sentenced to exile; and that his place of exile was an island. INTRODUCTION TO
Another passage of his writings (' Apol.,' 5), sometimes brought forward aa indirectly bearing upon the present question, says that Domitian was • milder persecutor than Nero, and implies that he himself restored those whom he had banished; but makes no mention of St. John. .And ind~d, npon the supposition that the case of St. John was in Tertullian's mind when he wrote this passage, it would not agree with the theory most in favour with the advocates of the later date for the .Apocalypse, namely, that St. John was one of the exiles set free by Nerva after Domitian's death; neither would the general tenor of it agree with the notion that Domitian rather than Nero was styled emphatically" the tyrant." (3) Origen, about the middle of the second century, having occasion in his commentary on St. Matthew (' Huet.,' i. 417 B) to mention that, "as tradition teaches, the Emperor of the Romans condemned John to the island of Patmos," goes apparently out; of his way to remark that, in the .Apocalypse, John liimself does not say who condemned. him. But Origen's language does not imply that there was any doubt as to which emperor had banished the apostle; much less does it assert that the name of the emperor was not give~ because St. John himself had not given it. It simply points out that it was from an external tradition and not from internal evidence (in St. John's own work, the .Apooalypse) that people in the third century lea.rut the fact that St. John was banished by "the (not an) Emperor of the Romans." We cannot tell whether Origen had or had not any definite knowledge or theory as to which. emperor the tradition blamed for condemn- ing St. John; he certainly does not repeat Irenrene's assertion that it was Domitian; and there is nothing to show t.ha.t he did not think it was Nero.
§ 4. PLACE. It has always been the general opinion that the Book of Revelation was written in the same place where the revelation was seen, that is, in the island of Patmos, situated in the south-east of the lEgrean Sea. Patmos is about the same distance east-south-east of Miletns, as Miletus is to the south of Ephesus. It is situated in about 37° 20' north latitude, and 26° 35' east longiilude; in that subdivision of the great lEgrean which classical geographers- designate the Icarian Sea; and in that group of its innumerable islands which the ancients well named the "Sporades," i.e. the "scattered" ones. It is quite a small island, mountainous and almost barren. In the side of one of its eminences is the cave which tradition assere to have been the very place where the apostle was favoured with the visions recorded in hie book. And in the book itself St. John tells us ( eh. i. 9) that he "was in the isle that is called Patmos." Then he immediately (vers. 10 and 11) relates that he heard a. voice, saying, "What thou eeest, write in a. book; " from which it is fairly inferred that it was in the island of Pp.tmos that the voice was heard, that the visions were seen, and that the book was written. A few commentators have, however, held the opinion that the book w~ THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. vii