It is the vocabulary and style of the Gospel of John, the Johannine epistles, and Revelation that scholars generally point to as decisive evidence against common authorship. Centuries ago, Dionysius encourages a sharp distinction between John’s works by emphasizing the…
Writers of commentaries and New Testament introductions uniformly report that the authorship of Revelation is a controversial issue. Although the authorship of John the apostle is still defended in conservative circles, scholars outside of these circles commonly reject it and…
Pliny’s letter to Emperor Trajan also refers to people who claim that they were once Christians, but denied their faith in Christ as much as twenty years ago. As was the case in Pliny’s own time, at least some of…
Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan, the Roman Emperor, might shed some light on the persecution of Christians in John’s seven churches, including Pergamum and Smyrna. Around A.D. 112, Pliny is the governor of Bithynia in northern Asia Minor; he writes a…
Here are a few more of my reflections related to writing a commentary on Revelation. 3. The ethical teaching of Revelation. One of the unexpected benefits of wrestling with Revelation was that I became more familiar with the ethical teaching…
In January of this year, I finished a seven-year project. In retrospect, it seems more like a journey than a project. I would like to describe a few aspects of my journey in hopes that I can share some of…
Sometime in January of 2017, I finally finished a project that I have been working on for 7 years. The results of my labor on the book of Revelation produced a commentary of about 490 pages. In the next few…
Like Chrysostom, John Calvin (d. 1564) is a proponent of typology and a critic of the allegorical interpretation of Origen. Calvin looks to the New Testament to help him to interpret the Old Testament (Puckett 178). In the long quote that…
John Chrysostom (d. 407) came from Antioch and was such a great preacher that he earned the name “Chrysostom” (golden mouth). Chrysostom was influenced by the so-called Antiochene school, because he sat under the teaching of Diodore of Tarsus, a…
In this post, we will look at some more examples of the confusion of typology and allegorical interpretation. As we saw in the previous post, some Church Fathers encourage the confusion by using the terms “allegory” or “allegorical” for interpretations…