A History of the End of the World by Jonathan Kirsch

was originally intended: “I, John, your brother and comrade in tribulation and patient endurance in Jesus.” 5 The fact that the author of Revelation calls himself “John,” however, hardly means that he is the same John who is mentioned in the Gospels. The Hebrew name “Yohanan” and its Greek equivalent, “Ioannes,” both of which are rendered in English translation as “John,” had been in common usage among both Jews and Christians long before the Gospels or Revelation were first composed. Indeed, the New Testament itself knows of several men called John, including not only the apostle John but also John the Baptist, a wandering preacher who is among the first to proclaim Jesus to be the Messiah.
    The tradition that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation began with its first appearance among the Christian communities of the Roman Empire. Irenaeus (ca. 120–ca. 200), an influential Christian bishop in what is now the city of Lyons in southern France, reports that Revelation “was seen not very long ago, almost in our generation, at the close of the reign of Domitian”—that is, no later than 96 C.E. 6 And Irenaeus is the very first commentator to attribute the authorship of Revelation to “John, the disciple of the Lord,” a belief that was affirmed by several other early church fathers, including Justin Martyr and Origen. But a more cautious bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria (ca. 200–ca. 265), while conceding that Revelation is a work “of which many good Christians have a very high opinion,” was the first to insist that Revelation and the Fourth Gospel “could not have been written by the same person.” 7
    Dionysius, like countless other Bible critics to come, was alert to the obvious and disturbing contrasts between the Fourth Gospel and Revelation, including the marked differences in the fundamental theological stance of each work: the Gospel embraces what theologians call a “present” eschatology, while Revelation knows only a “futuristic” one. 8 According to certain passages in the Gospel of John, for example, Christians need not wait until the end-times to enjoy the blessing of eternal life; rather, they are saved in the here and now: “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die,” says Jesus. “He who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.” 9 By contrast, Revelation insists that salvation must await the end of the world—the Tribulation, the Resurrection, and the Day of Judgment—at some unknown moment in the future when “the trumpet call is sounded by the seventh angel” and “the mystery of God is fulfilled.” 10
    Perhaps even more provocative, at least to expert readers of ancient Greek, are the differences in language and literary style between the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation. When scholars compare the words and phrases of Revelation and the Fourth Gospel in order to calculate the number of Greek terms that are used in both texts but nowhere else in the New Testament, they find only eight words in common. 11 An even more unsettling difference between the two texts is found in each author’s command of the common (or “Koine”) Greek in which the Christian scriptures are written. The Greek used in the Gospel is “correct and elegant,” while the Greek used in Revelation is “inaccurate and even barbarous,” according to Adela Yarbro Collins, a leading expert on the book of Revelation (and the spouse of John J. Collins, a fellow specialist in apocalyptic studies). 12
    Nowhere in Revelation, in fact, does the author claim to be the apostle John, nor does he refer to any experiences that might place him among the apostles during the lifetime of Jesus. Indeed, he appears to be uninterested in—and perhaps even unaware of—the life story of Jesus as it is described in such evocative detail in the Gospels. At one point in Revelation, he makes a passing reference to the twelve apostles in the third person, which strongly