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devour the adversaries; the heavenly city which hath foundations; the cloud of witnesses; Mount Zion; the heavenly Jerusalem; the general assembly, and the church of the first-born; the shaking of the heaven and earth, that the new heaven and new earth which cannot be shaken may remain. In the first of Peter occurs the expression, "The revelation of Jesus Christ," twice or thrice repeated; and Peter also makes mention of the church at Babylon, which it seems difficult to account for, unless we suppose him to have used the name after the manner of the revelator. Sir Isaac further supposes that the sure word of prophecy, referred to in the 2d Epistle of Peter, was the prophecy of the revelator. It must be confessed that there is a remarkable agreement between the contents of that Epistle, after mention is made of "the sure word of prophecy," and the contents of the Apocalypse. In fact, in one place, Peter seems to be fearful that the Christians would not watch diligently for the coming of their Lord, because the revelator had spoken of the intervention of a thousand years before the establishment of the New Jerusalem; and he proceeds to say, "that the heavens and the earth which are now by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." And, apparently through fear that they would not expect to live to see this day, on account of some impression they had, from divine authority, that a thousand years were to pass away before these events should happen, he bids them remember "that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day;" 2 Peter, iii. 8; "that the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is long suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance;" that the day of the Lord should come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise; which seems to agree quite nearly with what the revelator said should happen after the thousand years had expired,

viz., "I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them;" Rev. xx. 11. The revelator then proceeds to speak of the judgment of the dead, small and great; after which, he tells us, that the New Jerusalem came down from God out of heaven, and that the tabernacle of God is with men, referring to the establishment of the kingdom of God upon the earth. And in the same manner Peter, after he had mentioned the thousand years, and insisted, notwithstanding this term had been used, still the day was near, and would come as a thief, and the heavens and earth that then were should pass away, proceeds to say, that nevertheless he looked, agreeably to the promise of God, for new heavens and a new earth," wherein dwelleth righteousness. These answer to the New Jerusalem, seen by John, in which God would dwell with men, and there should be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor pain. It seems to us very probable, from the comparison here instituted between the Epistle of Peter and the Apocalypse, that the latter was written before the former. Nero began to reign A. D. 54. The two Epistles of Peter are supposed to have been written about ten or eleven years after this; so that a sufficient time did elapse after Nero came to the throne, and before the Epistles of Peter were written, for that emperor to banish John to Patmos, for John to write the Apocalypse there, and for the Christians to get a knowledge of it.

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7. There are other circumstances which serve to confirm the impression that the Apocalypse could not have been written so late as the reign of Domitian, and near the end of his reign, as Irenæus hath it. That emperor ceased to reign in A. D. 96; and hence we are told that the Apocalypse was written about 95 or 96. But how old was John at that date? (for it is allowed by those who adhere to this date that John was the author of the book.) We suppose he could not have been far from the age of our Lord. But allowing that he was somewhat younger, say

twenty-five, at the time he was called to be an apostle, then he must have been ninety-three or ninety-four at the time it is said he wrote the Apocalypse. Does this appear probable? Can we believe that the man was over ninety years of age when he wrote that book? There is a luxuriance of imagination displayed in the Apocalypse that comports much better with his age at an earlier date than at the year 96, when, as we have shown, he must have been nearly an hundred years old. We hold, then, that the extreme age of John in the year 95 or afterwards, would show that he could not then have written the Apocalypse.

8. There still remains another consideration. It is said, by those competent to judge, that the original text of the Apocalypse, although exhibiting the same general peculiarities of diction with St. John's Gospel and Epistles, yet nevertheless abounds much more in Hebraisms and anomalies- a circumstance which seems to intimate an earlier period of the author's life, when he had but just begun to write in a foreign tongue.

Sir Isaac Newton, speaking of the style of the Apocalypse, says: "It is fuller of Hebraisms than John's Gospel. From thence it may be gathered, that it was written when John was newly come out of Judea, where he had been used to the Syriac tongue; and that he did not write his Gospel, till, by long converse with the Asiatic Greeks, he had left off most of the Hebraisms.” — ("Observations," &c., part ii., chap. i.)

IV. -RECAPITULATION.

We have thus gone through, in a very brief manner, with the category of reasons, which have been suggested to our mind, in favor of the fact that the Apocalypse was written previously to the destruction of Jerusalem. In regard to the historical testimony, it will be remembered, that Epiphanius repeatedly affirmed

that the book was written in the reign of Claudius, or previously to 54. Tertullian, and after him Jerome, are supposed to have taught that John was banished to Patmos in the reign of Nero, and this agrees with the title-page of the Syriac version of the book; but Irenæus affirms that the Apocalypse was seen near the end of Domitian's reign. The mass of the writers have followed Irenæus, so that after all we perhaps have the testimony of only one man to this point. But is it certain that Irenæus meant that the Apocalypse was not written until that time? He says it was not seen. Did he mean that John did not have his vision until then? or that the work had not appeared, so far as he knew, until that date? If he meant the latter, it is consistent with the fact that it was written in the time of Nero. If he meant the former, then we shall be obliged to conclude with Sir Isaac Newton, that that father had perhaps heard from his master, Polycarp, that he had received this book from John about the time of Domitian's death; or indeed John might himself at that time have made a new publication of it, from whence Irenæus might have imagined it was then but newly written. But even though no force be given to these conjectures, the preponderance of evidence found in the book itself is so great, in favor of the belief that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem, that in our mind not a single doubt remains. This supposition, thus substantially established, agrees entirely with the divine character of the book. It weakens not our confidence in its authenticity. It places the writing of it nearer to the day of Christ; and it enables us to show that it has a nearer and stronger alliance to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and to the Epistles. It enables us to interpret what is said in the Apocalypse of the coming of Christ, the day of the Lord, the judgment of the nations, the establishment of his kingdom, and the descent of the New Jerusalem, in harmony with the signification which those subjects unquestionably bear in the Gospels and Epistles. The

Gospel of John was not written probably until after the destruction of Jerusalem; and this is the reason, we conclude, why the luminous discourse of Jesus concerning that event, recorded by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is omitted by John. But this reason, which would lead us to assign a late date to the Gospel of John, would lead us to assign an earlier date to the Apocalypse; for therein we find most of the warnings, comparisons, metaphors, and prophecies, pertaining to the destruction of Jerusalem, which the three first-named Gospels and the Epistles contain.

We conclude, then, with a repetition of the remark above made, that in our mind there remains not a doubt that the Apocalypse was written before the destruction of Jerusalem.

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