.,{ot written until alter the apostle had left the island. They have supported their view by alleging the improbability of a banished man in St. John's circamsta,neea poaseBBing the time and materials and opportunity for writing; but such an allegation is not, after all, of very mnch weight. .And one passage of the book itself (eh. x. 4) seems to imply that what the saint· eRw and heard he wrote down at once, on the spot; for he says, " When the seven thunders uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying, Seal up the things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not~•• The frequent reiteration of the COtnID.a.nd to write, which occnrs at the beginning of each of the seven Epistles to the Churches, and five times besides (eh. i. 11, 19; xiv. 13; xix. 9; xxi. 5), ia perhaps best understood on the supposition that the book was written piecemeal, each vision seen and nttera.nce heard being at once recorded by him who beheld and listened. Therefore, while we readily admit the possi'bi1ity of the theory that the :Book of Revelation was written after the author had left Patmos-a theory as ancient as the time of Victorinns of Pettau, and supported by Arethas, who assigns the Ionian district about Ephesus as the place of writing--,,we hold that internal evidence concurs with the mass of external opinion in supporting the probability that the book was committed to writing on that same •island of Patmos, where the visions and voices were vouchsafed to "the disciple whom Jesus loved."
§ 5. MJ.NUSCRIPTS,
Of the original Greek text of the Apocalypse there a.re about a hlllldred and twenty manscr:ipta known to scholars ; and probably there are also in existence others whose existence is not at present known to any one beyond the owners and a small circle of friends, if even to the very owners them- selves. It is a.lso possible that some of the manuscripts which are now reckoned among the hundred and twenty containing the Apocalypse, may hereafter be found not really to contain that book at all. The list of Greek Apocalyptic manuscripts has had to be seriously modified during recent years from each of these causes. The known manuscripts of the Greek text of the Apocalypse are thua o'nly few in number compared with those of other parts of the Ne~ Testa- ment. Of the Acts and Catholic Epistles there are more than twice u.s :many, and of the Pauline Epistles thrice as many, to say nothing of the hundred and twenty-seven copies of the 'Praxapostolos' or 'Lectiona.ry containing the Church Lessons taken from the Acts and Epistles.' Of the holy Gospels there are about eight hnndred Greek manuscripts known, besides about four hundred copies of the ' Evangelistru-inm,' or 'Lectionary containing the Church Lessons taken from the Gospels.' So that we may fairly say there is ten times more material, in the form .of Greek manu- scripts, for settling the text of the Gospels than there is for ·that of ilie vi_ii INTRODUCTION TO
Apocalypse. No portion of the Apocalypse seems t.o occur in any Greek lectionary. Moreover, we a-re obliged t.o confess that the mannscript.e which have hitherto been fnlly nsed for the criticism of the text of the Apocalypse form only a small portion of those which a.re paraded in our ·lists. Tischendorf, in his latest edition, does indeed refer to seventy-seven different manuscripts in the critical apparatus for this book; but to many of them his references a.re very' rare, and it is certain that he had only an imperfect knowledge of more than half of those which he cites. Tregelles, in 1872, only need thirteen, but all of them had been carefully collated throughout. Scrivener, writing after the publication of the Revised Version, states that only thirty- one manuscripts of the Apocalypse had at that time been satisfactorily colla.t.ed ; and we shall therefore be approximately right in supposing that to be the number upon which the Greek text of the Revisers, as well as the special edition of Westcott and Hort, is based. At the present time, there are at least fifty Greek manuscripts of the Apocalypse, the texts of which are practically unknown. The Greek text which is represented by onr Authorized Version was probably based upon no more than /00/1' manu- scripts, two of which-employed by the Complntensian editors and by Lorenzo Valla. respectively-are now unknown, or at least unidentified. As a partial justification of this strange neglect of the materials which have been spared to our times, it ought to be remarked that in all likeli- hood those manuscripts that have been most carefully examined include those which are intrinsically of the highest value, and that most probably a thorough investigation of all the rest would not seriously affect the form of the Greek text with which critics and Revisers have now made us familiar. But we hold that it is neither dutiful to God nor satisfaotorytodevout men to rest content with probabilities in such a matt.er, and that we ought to be ashamed of apathetic idleness, when by industry and effort something more might assuredly be done to restore the true words of God and to purify them from human el'ror and corruption. - · All the hundred a~d twenty known manuscripts are now preserved in European libraries, and are distril;luted as follows : Italy possesses forty- seven-thirty-five in Rome, five in Florence, fonr in Venice, one in Turin, one in Ferrara, and one in Messina. France has twenty-three-twenty-two in Paris, and one in Poictiers. England comes next, with twenty-two- ten in London, six in Oxford, two at Cheltenham, two at Parham Park in Surrey, one at Cambridge, and one at Leicester. There a.re seventeen in Germany-Vienna, Munich, and Dresden have four each; Hamburg, Frank- fort-on-the-Oder, W olfenbiittel, Mayhingen, and Zittau have one ea.eh. Russia claims seven, of which five are at Moscow and two at Petersbnrg. Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland have one a.piece, located in Dublin, the Escnrial, Upsal, and Basle respectively. Those which have been satisfactorily examined are thus distributed: nine in Lop.don; four each a.t Oxford and Moscow i -two each at Rome, Pl/-l'ia, THE REVELATION OF S'l'. JOHN THE DIVINE. ix