He

furnishing the basis for its anthropomorphic development in the antichrist legend; but it is obvious that if the principle is valid it applies to the nature, and indirectly to the origin, of many other parts of the book. It has been so applied especially by Bousset (Der Antichrist in der Ueberlieferung d. Judenth. 1895), who has exploited these materials, often with convincing weight, in his standard edition of the Apocalypse (-Meyer, 1896), though quite independently of his predecessor. They differ in detail. But both work chiefly on the religious-historical line in preference to that of literary criticism, although Bousset follows Weizsäcker in the general treatment of the sources. Gunkel's sweep is narrower. starts from a part of the Apocalypse so admittedly isolated as chap. 12. The key to this lies in pre-Semitic folk-lore outside both the Old and the New Testament, and has been found by different scholars in Egyptian or Greek mythology,—the former with its cycle of Hathor, her young sun-god Horus, and Typhon the seven-headed dragon; the latter with its legend of Apollo's birth and Leto's persecution by Pytho, localised in Ephesus. Gunkel, however, prefers the old Babylonian myth (mediated through Dan 7, 8) of the birth of Marduk the young sun-god, and his triumph over Tiâmat the dragon-monster of the water. To these Bousset refuses to adhere; he finds the clue not even in the Jewish tradition of a pre-existent Messiah, but in an old sun-myth, Jesus taking the place of the young god of light and the woman representing idealised Israel. Bousset's method, then, is to regard the Apocalypse not as the mechanical compilation of sources by a redactor, but as an apocalyptic writing in which, true to the apocalyptic tradition (Gunkel, op. cit. p. 252 f.), the author has used traditional material and adopted pieces which lay before him in a more or less stereotyped form. Along with these an oral and possibly esoteric tradition 2 has to be reckoned, persisting from age to age. Thus in 111. 2 he finds an apocalyptic fragment dating from before 70 A.D. possibly Jewish in origin; in 113-18 a fragment of tradition on the antichrist which reached the writer in connection with the fragment on the temple (111. 2); in chap. 13-the highest point of the apocalyptic drama-an old tradition of Nero combined with a cognate tradition of antichrist; in 1414-20 another foreign element, or tradition of antichrist= Enoch 1001. 2; in 199. 10 a piece of traditional polemic against Jewish or Jewish-Christian angel-worship Asc. Isa. 721; in 202. (after Gunkel, 91-95) an older picture; in 204-10 a Jewish tradition on Gog and Magog Sibyll iii. 319 f. 663; in 21-225 the combination of two traditions, (a) the favourite one of the new Jerusalem, existing in a written form,

1 Cp. Schmiedel, LC, 1895, pp. 1545-1547; also Bousset's articles in EBi, i. on "Antichrist" and "Apocalypse," and the Eng. trans. of his Antichrist by Mr. A. H. Keane (1896), especially pp. xiv-xxiv. On the relations between the older Babylonian religion and the Jewish and later Gnostic developments, as well as on the Persian influences (Tobit), cp. Anz (TU, xv. pp. 4, 61-110), Schwally (Das Leben nach dem Tode, p. 146 f.), Beer (KAP, ii. p. 233 f.), and Bible Folk-Lore, 1884, pp. 301-318. 2 1 Th 415 (3), 2 Th 25-8, οὐ μνημονεύετε ὅτι ἔτι ὢν πρὸς ὑμᾶς, ταῦτα ἔλεγον ὑμῖν κτλ. On which Bornemann quotes Origen's remark (in Matth. Comm., IV. p. 329): "Forte quoniam apud Judaeos erant quidam sive per scripturas profitentes de temporibus consummationis se scire, sive de secretis, ideo haec scribit.'

3 The irreconcilable antipathy of the Jews to Rome's suzerainty over Palestine had, on its religious side, an undaunted hope for a new Jerusalem and for the expulsion, or even the overthrow, of the pagans. This rested on the belief in a Messiah's advent and terrestrial reign. For the annihilation of the Empire, cp. Apoc Baruch 106 f. 63 f.). Wellhausen (Skizzen u. Vorarbeiten, VI. pp. 225-234), however, remains sceptical on Gunkel's interpretation as a whole, in regard to the Apocalypse (see the latter's reply in ZwTh, 1899, pp. 581-611).

and (b) that of the heavenly Jerusalem, which sprang up only after 70 A.D. (cp. Apoc Bar and 4th Esdras). Apart from details, Gunkel and Bousset 1 have opened a fruitful line of research, parallel in some respects to that developed by Usener in another province of the NT; and any attempt to get behind the Apocalypse to its roots in the folk-lore and sagas of earlier and even foreign thought, is a much-needed corollary to the analytic methods of source-criticism. After discount is allowed for exaggeration and premature conclusions, it affords considerable aid in the tangled problem of dating the book and its various sources.

The critical basis upon which the book has been arranged in the present edition approximates substantially to that of Weizsäcker, and may be roughly outlined as follows. The seven letters to the churches are, I think, to be regarded, with the great majority of editors (despite Spitta and Bousset), as a separate section, among the latest in the whole hook, and most characteristic of the author and of the crisis at which he wrote. As for the rest of the volume, chaps. 4-22, the standpoint of criticism here is practically that already adopted in the case of Acts. Both writings in their present form belong to the last decade of the first century. Both depend upon sources of more or less value and weight, reaching back to the period preceding the crisis of 70. In both, these sources have been partly submerged; but in part they rise visibly above the materials contributed by the final author. In the case of the Apocalypse, then, as of Acts, it is still feasible to mark by means of darker type one or two passages-varying from large to small paragraphs -which bear traces of earlier origin, and at the same time to note in brackets one or two phrases in which the later editor has Christianised the materials before him, even when the precise date and character of these materials slip away from a reasonable analysis.

Two interesting features become transparent in this collection of materials. The sources are neither consistent, point for point, with one another, nor are they always to be reconciled with the actual history to which they refer. The explanation of these discrepancies largely lies in the general nature of prophecy and apocalyptic, and is best summed up in the canon: "Prophecies, especially those of an apocalyptic nature, are retained as tradition, without reference to their confirmation or refutation by history, and merely on the ground of the authority they have acquired" (Weizsäcker). This may be quoted once for all as the clue to many of the familiar puzzles in the Apocalypse of John.

616.--The suspicion that the remarkable addition kaì ảπò Tηs ỏрyês Toù apvíov is an interpolation, is corroborated by the fact that auroû (not avrov, an obvious correction 2) occurs in the next verse. This may be a usage similar to that in 1 Th 311, 2 Th 216. 17, but internal evidence and the parallelism turn the scale in the opposite direction. The insertion of the reference to the Lamb was natural in a later editor or scribe, in order to definitely mark the Christian allusion of the OT passages here cited. So especially Vischer, Völter, Weyland, Pfleiderer, and Spitta.

3

71-8. The patent duality in this chapter leaves only one question open which of the two sections is the source, and which is due to the

:

1 See also the latter's reply (ThLz, 1898, pp. 578-583) to Erbes' monograph (Der Antichrist in den Schriften des NT, 1897). His view is endorsed by M. R. James (DB, iii. pp. 226, 227).

2 As Bousset points out, after Weiss, auro explains the variant airy, not vice versâ. 3 So conservative a scholar as Simcox (CGT, "Revelation," Appendix) is almost driven by this discrepancy to follow Vischer and regard vers. 9-17 as an interpolation.

different standpoint of the editor? Probably vers. 1-8 are to be taken as an abrupt (note the four bound winds, never unloosed afterwards) and interpolated fragment from some Jewish (?) source (so Spitta and Bousset), a hypothesis which is supported by the stylistic resemblances of vers. 9-17 to the rest of the Apocalypse. The definite eschatological horizon of vers. 1-8 comes from Jewish or Jewish-Christian tradition. The author supplements it by a wider Christian outlook (the stress falling on the Gentile Christian martyrs), whose incompatibility with the former section was probably hidden from him by the semi-spiritual way in which he interpreted the language of vers. 1-8. In its original setting the latter piece may be placed before 70 A.D., as an expression of JewishChristianity in Jerusalem (Weizsäcker). For a good discussion cp. Bousset, ad loc. pp. 336-339. The impossibility of identifying both multitudes may be taken as the starting-point of critical research, and a divergence between the 144,000 here (a faithful remnant from the old faith) and in 141 (a nucleus of ascetics) is also axiomatic.

1

111-13-This fragment, which stands quite out of connection with the following (cp. 912 with 1114) section, is regarded by most editors as a Jewish source to which the author of the Apocalypse leads up by means of chap. 10, although the latter (1011) serves as the prelude to an even wider outlook (chaps. 17, 18). So especially Weizsäcker, Pfleiderer, Schmidt, Schön, Sabatier, Bousset, and McGiffert (AA, p. 635). It forms a sudden vision, breaking in upon the progress of the trumpet-visions with isolated contents which are neither resumed nor carried forward in the subsequent chapters. It also contains some linguistic peculiarities of its own, and represents, e.g., the seer in an active capacity (not passive, as elsewhere). Some hint of the date of the passage might be found in ver. 8; but "the great city" there may be taken either as Rome (in which case, as with many scholars, ὅπου καὶ ὁ κύριος αὐτῶν ἐσταυρώθη is a gloss) or as Jerusalem (so strongly Bousset, who develops from it his theory of the antichrist's appearance in Jerusalem as a defiant opponent of God and a deluder of the people). It is safer to regard at least vers. 1, 2 as a separate fragment, written before 70 by a loyal Jew 2 who refuses to believe in the possible profanation of the temple (cp. Lk 2124, Bousset). If, as is quite possible, the author was a Jewish-Christian, it is a curious instance of the fluidity and variety of such conceptions that the present idea of the temple being preserved is in flat contradiction3 to the other tradition represented by Mk 132 (=Mt 242, Lk 216) and Ac 7 (the address of Stephen), which is certainly genuine. The whole passage then "When the servants of God have been sealed in their foreheads, and we expect the wrath of God to break forth upon the rest of the world" (cp. ver. 8) then, as he complains, we have instead a vision of God's servants already triumphant: not of the 'great tribulation,' but of those who came out of it. The vision of the saints

66

in triumph seems out of place at this stage of events." But it is proleptic. 1 Recently Jülicher (Einl. pp. 181, 182).

2 So Wellhausen (Skizzenu. Vorarbeiten, VI. p. 215 f.), who attributes this fragment to the Zealots (vide the well-known passage of Josephus), and chap. 12 to the Pharisaic circle in Jerusalem towards the end of the seventh decade, the latter of whom preserved a purely religious attitude, as distinct from the active patriotism of the sectaries. Both passages were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic (so Gunkel).

A point that is almost fatal to the hypothesis that John the apostle composed the book. The attempt to escape from this conclusion by the surmise that the author is spiritualising, is quite inadequate to meet the facts and evidence. Whatever may have been the final sense in which the editor read these and some other passages, their original meaning was certainly literal.

(vers. 1-13) represents an expectation that the Jewish people would be converted or destroyed by means of a catastrophe which would be due to their treatment of Enoch and Elijah, the God-sent messengers of Messiah. If vers. 3-10 hang with 1, 2, the whole passage falls into the years 67–70,1 when the crisis was viewed as a sharp measure for inducing national repentance. If not, they may be brought down somewhat later; and this is perhaps easier, as vers. 3-10 do not of themselves imply that crisis.

12. This, as the large majority of editors admit, forms an isolated and distinct section, which introduces chap. 13, but stands out of all relation to the rest of the Apocalypse. To recapitulate the birth of the Messiah at this stage (1119) is almost out of keeping with the solemn series of visions which it interrupts.

Its date depends on the principle used to unlock its meaning-(a) historical or (b) mythological. In the former case, it is either Christian or Jewish; to be referred to the persecution and flight of the primitive Christians from Jerusalem to Pella in the seventh decade, or to the ideal Jewish church (Hos 11-3, 4 Esdras 938 f.) from which the Messiah sprang, in its troubles under Caligula or Titus. No construction on these lines is without its difficulties, and it is impossible to press the details of the dragon's manoeuvre into historical references either to Herod or to any of the Roman emperors. "The pictures .. ... seem to shift like a dissolving view" (Simcox). Certainly the absence of all reference to the crucifixion and the general colours of the sketch favour a Jewish origin, upon the whole. When (b) is adopted (see above, p. 683),2 an exact determination of the source's date becomes less possible than ever. In this case the groundwork of the source, possibly an old sun-myth, is found originally outside both Jewish and Christian territory; but the Christian author has taken it from a primarily Jewish application, and used it here to explain the life of Jesus and the fortunes of his followers. On the Babylonian groundwork of 3, especially the Babylonian divinity Adapa, a semi-mortal Doppelgänger of Marduk, who in his capacity of

1 Lagarde (GGA, 1891, pp. 498-520) even placed Dan 7 in this period (67 A.D.), interpreting the "small horn as Vespasian.

2 In The Homeric Centones (1898), Prof. Rendel Harris points to another source which, he thinks, the author of this saga had in mind, namely, the vision in Iliad 2306 f, where a blood-red serpent swallows a brood of little sparrows and the motherbird. Here also (in Apoc 12) the mother has wings and more children (1217) than one, but otherwise the parallelism is not so striking as that of the similar myths already cited. The storming of heaven (= Eph 612) by the dragon, as Cheyne points out (EBi, i. p. 1131), is a replica of Tiâmat's rebellion, and the flood of water occurs in the myth narrated in Addit. Esther (115-11). Jensen (apud Wildeboer, Kurzer HandComm. A. T., "Esther," pp. 173-176) explains the book of Esther from a similar Babylonian myth. Purim, he holds, is merely a Judaised allegorical edition of the Babylonian new-year festival, which in turn derived from the Babylonian version of the epos of Gilgamíš, with its account of the defeat of the Elamites and their national god Humman (= Haman) by their hereditary foes the Babylonians under Marduk (= Mordecai). We have cuneiform evidence that Assurbanipal recovered from the Elamites an image of Ištar (= Esther). J. H. Moulton (Exp. Ti. xi. pp. 257–260), founding in part upon a hint of Prof. Rendel Harris (The Story of Ahikar, 1898, pp. vii-lxxxviii; AJT, 1899, p. 541 f.), similarly conjectures that Tobit represents a Jewish edition of some old Iranian piece of folk-lore, which applies and adapts the older myth to specially Hebrew needs. This current of influence as a factor in preChristian Judaism is also worked out by E. Stave: Ueber den Einfluss d. Parsismus auf. d. Judentum (1898), p. 145 f.; he discusses the relation of Jewish angelology to the NT conceptions (ibid. pp. 227 f.), identifying, e.g., the "angels" of Apoc 1-3 with the Parsee Fravashis, and pointing out a background to Eph 611. in the atmospheric battles of Parsee genii.

zir-amilúti ("seed of mankind ") is conjectured to have been a prototype of the Messianic conception of bar-nāshā (“son of man "), cp. Hommel, Exp. Ti. xi. pp. 341-345.

Both Pfleiderer and Bousset find traces of the editor's hand, particularly in vers. 10-11 (where the reasons for the victory resemble 714, and have no relation to the reason already adduced by the source, i.e. Michael's power, ver. 7)1, also in 17 (where the "rest of the seed" must refer to Christians, and cannot have had a place in the original Jewish document), which is introduced partly to bridge the gap between chaps. 12 and 13. Wellhausen finds Christian additions also in vers. 11 and 17 (kaì èx. T. μ. 'Inoo), and takes vers. 1-6, 7-14 as variants of one idea. But the fact is, this fragment is one of several in the apocalyptic literature, and even beyond it (e.g. 4 Mac 186b-13), where an interpolation cannot be sharply assigned with any conclusiveness to a Christian or a Jewish source. Both religions had much common matter in those days, and they cannot be strictly kept apart: cp. Gunkel's luminous remarks on Paul and the author of 4th Esdras, KAP, ii. pp. 343-349.

138.—τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου is, as most editors rightly detect (Vischer, Völter, Spitta, Weyland, Schön, Sabatier, Pfleiderer, Bousset), a gloss. The point of the passage is that the loyal remnant are predestined and enrolled in the book of life from the first; άπо к. к. goes with yéуparra in any case (178), and the natural interpolation of T. ¿. T. ¿. is, like the similar case of 616, due to the later editor or to a scribe. The idea that a list and record of the faithful was preserved in heaven, formed a commonplace of Jewish apocalyptic. This gloss definitely connected it with Jesus. A similar process has been detected by some critics in 513 and 144, besides 1410, 153, where the introduction of a reference to "the Lamb" is either awkward or inappropriate. Suidas has this note upon ἀρνίον. (Αρνίον) ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ, ὡς φασιν, ἀνθρωπεία φωνῇ ἐλάλησεν· εὑρέθη δέ ἔχον βασίλειον δράκοντα ὑπὲρ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ πτερωτόν, ἔχοντα μῆχος πήχεων δ. καί τινι λελάληκε τὰ μέλλοντα.

14.—Leaving aside as unproved the analyses of vers. 6-13, which converge upon vers. 12, 13 as a Christian interpolation in what was originally a Jewish source (so Pfleiderer, Schmidt, Vischer, Simcox, and Weyland), we may take vers. 14-20 with little hesitation as an earlier fragment which graphically but irrelevantly represents a final judgment of the earth. This is still to come, according to the Apocalypse. Upon this point criticism is practically unanimous, though there is difference of opinion as to its Jewish or Christian origin. Bousset, comparing Enoch 1002 f., etc., finds that the primitive tradition merely described a fight of the angels against antichrist in the wilderness outside Jerusalem, which was

1 Simcox solves this breach of continuity in ver. 11 by referring the verse proleptically to ver. 17, as ver. 6 to ver. 14.

2 On the question of this section (131-10) and its historical origin, cp. above, p. 680. That it originally referred to Caligula is quite a tenable theory (Spitta, Erbes, O. Holtzmann, Zahn), but it is impossible to separate source and editor precisely, owing to the freedom with which the latter has treated his materials at this point. All that we can be sure of is, that the passage in its present form belongs to the author of the whole book, while its roots lie some decades earlier in Caligula's reign; the two beasts, as they are represented in the present text, probably symbolise the cult and the provincial priesthood of the Caesar-worship.

3 Even Simcox admits that "if one might venture to discard as an interpolation any part of the attested text of the Apocalypse, it would be this passage." You expect, he urges, the dénouement of the harvest. But nothing occurs. "The earth goes on just as before."