- Chapters
- 22
- Verses
- 0
- Where it sits
- The Revelation
What it is
It calls itself three things in its own opening: an unveiling, a prophecy, and a letter. The letter part is real — chapters 2 and 3 address seven named congregations in Roman Asia, each with its own commendation and its own rebuke, and each is a real place you could have walked to.
Then it opens out into vision: the throne, the scroll, the Lamb standing as though slain, the seals and trumpets and bowls, the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon, and at the end a city coming down out of heaven where God wipes away every tear.
Its purpose is consolation, not prediction. It was written to churches under pressure to say that the Lamb, not Rome, is the one who actually holds history.
Where it sits
The author names himself only as John, on Patmos. Second-century writers identified him with the apostle. But the identification was contested in antiquity, and by an impeccable source: Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria in the third century, argued from the Greek itself that the Gospel and epistles of John are written with elegance and without error, while the Apocalypse uses barbarous idioms and outright solecisms — too wide a gap, he thought, for one hand. Eusebius preserves the argument at length. Modern scholarship generally agrees with his observation about the Greek and divides over what follows from it.
It is the most contested book in the New Testament, and it was contested in opposite directions. In the East, doubt persisted for centuries. In the Syriac-speaking church it was simply absent from the canon. In the West the unease was different — it was the book the millenarians used.
The thing to know
Revelation is canonical Scripture in the Orthodox Church and is never read liturgically in the Byzantine rite. It appears in no lectionary. It is the only New Testament book of which that is true.
No council gives a reason. The most likely explanation is historical rather than doctrinal: the lectionary had already settled into its shape during the centuries when the Greek East was still arguing about the book, and it never went back. Orthodox writers also point to the plain difficulty of the symbolism. Both of those are inference from the record, and should be read as inference.
The standard Orthodox commentary is by St Andrew of Caesarea, written early in the seventh century, revising an earlier Greek commentary by Oecumenius — and it remains standard to the point that later Orthodox commentary on Revelation is largely commentary on St Andrew. That tradition reads the visions typologically and spiritually. It has no interest in timetables, and takes the thousand years as the age of the Church rather than a coming earthly kingdom.
Known for
1:8. Chapters 2 and 3, the letters to the churches. 5:6, the Lamb. 12:1–9. 21:1–4.