The accidents of history have transmitted Paul to us in comparative clarity, and have left the apostle John in obscurity and mystery. Besides three epistles, two major works have come down to us under his name. Criticism tentatively assigns the Book of Revelation to the year 69-70,72 and to another John, “the Presbyter” mentioned by Papias (135).73 Justin Martyr (135) attributes this powerful Apocalypse to the “beloved” apostle;74 but as early as the fourth century Eusebius75 noted that some scholars doubted its authenticity. The author must have been a man of considerable prominence, for he addresses the churches of Asia in a tone of menacing authority. If the apostle wrote it (and we may provisionally continue to think so), we can understand why, like his brother James, he was called Boanerges, Son of Thunder. In Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Sardis, and other cities of Asia Minor, John, rather than Peter or Paul, was looked upon as the highest head of the Church. Tradition as reported by Eusebius76 held that John had been banished to Patmos by Domitian, and had on that Aegean isle written both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse. He lived to so great an age that people said he would never die.
In form Revelation resembles the books of Daniel and Enoch. Such prophetic-symbolic visions were a literary device frequently used by the Jews of the age; there were several other apocalypses (“hidden things revealed”), but this one surpassed all the rest in lurid eloquence. Starting from the common belief that the coming of the Kingdom of God would be preceded by the reign of Satan and the heyday of evil, the author describes the principate of Nero as precisely this Satanic age. Satan and his followers, having revolted against God, are defeated by Michael’s angelic hosts, are cast down upon the earth, and there lead the pagan world in the attack upon Christianity. Nero is the Beast and Antichrist of the book, a Messiah from Satan as Jesus was from God. Rome is described as “the harlot who sits on the great waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication”; she is the “whore of Babylon,” the source and center and summit of all iniquity, immorality, perversion, idolatry; there the blasphemous and bloodstained Caesars demand the worship that Christians must reserve for Christ.
In a succession of visions the author sees the punishments that will fall upon Rome and its empire. A plague of locusts will for five months torture all inhabitants except the 144,000 Jews who have on their foreheads the sign of Christianity.77 Other angels will empty “the seven vials of God’s wrath” upon the earth, afflicting men with terrible sores, and turning the sea “into blood like a dead man’s,” so that “every living thing in the sea” will die. Another angel will let loose the full heat of the sun upon all unrepentant men; another will cover the earth with darkness; four angels will lead “twice 10,000 times 10,000” knights to slaughter a third of mankind. Four horsemen will ride forth to “kill the people with sword, famine, death, and the wild animals of the earth.”78 A great earthquake will tumble the planet into ruins; huge hailstones will fall upon the surviving infidels, and Rome will be utterly destroyed. The kings of the earth will come together on the plains of Armageddon to make their last stand against God; but they will be overwhelmed in death. Satan and his cohorts, everywhere defeated, will be plunged into Hell. Only true Christians will be saved from these calamities; and those who have suffered for Christ’s sake, who have been “washed in the blood of the Lamb,”79 will receive abounding reward.
After a thousand years Satan will be released to prey again upon mankind; sin will mount again in an unbelieving world; and the forces of evil will make a last effort to undo the work of God. But they will once more be overcome, and this time Satan and his followers will be cast into Hell forever. Then will come the Last Judgment, when all the dead will be raised from their graves, and the drowned will be drawn up out of the seas. On that dread day all “whose names are not found in the Book of Life” will be “flung into … a burning lake of fire and brimstone.”80 The faithful will “gather for God’s great banquet, and will eat the bodies of kings, commanders, mighty men . . . the bodies of all men, slaves or freemen, high or low,”81 who have not heeded the call of Christ. A new heaven and earth will be formed, and a New Jerusalem will come down from the hand of God to be a paradise on earth. It will have a foundation of precious stones, buildings of translucent silver or gold, walls of jasper, and each gate a single pearl; through it will run a “river of living water,” on whose bank will grow the “tree of life.” The reign of evil will be ended for all time; the faithful of Christ will inherit the earth; “there will be no death any longer, nor night, nor any grief or pain.”82
The influence of the Book of Revelation was immediate, enduring, and profound. Its prophecies of salvation for loyal believers, and of punishment for their enemies, became the sustenance of a persecuted Church. Its theory of the millennium solaced those who mourned the long delay in the second coming of Christ. Its vivid images and brilliant phrases entered into both the popular and the literary speech of Christendom. For nineteen centuries men have interpreted the events of history as fulfillments of its visions; and in some recesses of the white man’s world it still gives its dark colors and bitter flavor to the creed of Christ.
It seems incredible that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel should have come from the same hand. The Apocalypse is Jewish poetry, the Fourth Gospel is Greek philosophy. Perhaps the apostle wrote Revelation in justifiable wrath after Nero’s persecution, and the Gospel in the mellow metaphysics of his old age (A.D. 90?). His memories of the Master may by this time have faded a bit, so far as one could ever forget Jesus; and doubtless in the isles and cities of Ionia he had heard many an echo of Greek mysticism and philosophy. Plato had set a theme by picturing the Ideas of God as the patterns on which all things were formed; the Stoics had combined these Ideas into the Logos Spermatikos or fertilizing wisdom of God; the Neo-Pythagoreans had made the Ideas a divine person; and Philo had turned them into the Logos or Reason of God, a second divine principle, through which God created, and communicated with, the world. If we reread the famous exordium of the Fourth Gospel with all this in mind, and retain the Logos of the Greek original in place of the translation Word, we perceive at once that John has joined the philosophers:
In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . All things were made by the Logos; without him nothing was made that was made. It was by him that all things came into existence. … So the Logos became flesh and blood, and dwelt amongst us.
Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being,83 and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul’s work of detaching Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law; he was made to address the Jews as “you,” and to speak of their Law as “yours”; he was not a Messiah sent “to save the lost sheep of Israel,” he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the background, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy; and the god Christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic mind. Now the pagan world—even the anti-Semitic world—could accept him as its own.
Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there, too, Christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the “ages of the world,” the “final conflagration,” the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the “Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”84 The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.85 Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.
I Our chief guide for this period is the Acts of the Apostles. It is universally agreed that this book and the Third Gospel are by the same author; but there is far less general acceptance of the tradition that both were written by Luke, the gentile friend of Paul. As Acts makes no mention of Paul’s death, the original work may have been composed about 63 as an effort to mollify Roman hostility to Christianity and Paul; but it was probably expanded by a later hand. It abounds in the supernatural, but its basic narrative may be accepted as history.1 In the second century various apocryphal “Acts” and “Epistles” rounded out with legend the story of the Apostles after Christ. These “Acts” were the historical novels of the age, not necessarily attempts at deception; the Church rejected them, but the pious accepted them, and increasingly confused them with history.
Of the seven letters ascribed in the New Testament to the Twelve Apostles, criticism inclines to accept the first of Peter as substantially genuine,2 to identify the author of the epistles of John with the disputed author of the Fourth Gospel; and to reject the rest as of doubtful authenticity.
II The speeches of Stephen, Peter, Paul, and others in Acts may have been invented by the author, after the general custom of ancient historians.
III Paul quotes the line from Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, or from Aratus’ Phainomena.
IV Perhaps we should credit the speech to the Hellenized author of the Acts.
V Of these we may regard the letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans as authentic; probably also those to the Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon; perhaps even the epistle to the Ephesians.43
VI The ancient Jews shared with the Canaanites, Moabites, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and other peoples the custom of sacrificing a child, even a beloved son, to appease the wrath of Heaven. In the course of time a condemned criminal might be substituted. In Babylonia he was dressed in royal robes to represent the son of the king, and was then scourged and hanged. A similar sacrifice took place in Rhodes at the feast of Cronus. The offering of a lamb or kid at the Passover was probably a civilized mitigation of ancient human sacrifice. “On the day of atonement,” says Frazer, “the Jewish high priest laid both his hands on the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and having thereby transferred the sins of the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.”51