Book of Revelation--UNAUTHENTIC

I ran across a blurb in wiki that stated that the Book of Revelation was long regarded as unauthentic and was not accepted until 1200 A.D.

Has anyone explored this?

Your thoughts, please.

Cameo, I agreee that Revelation is a book written by a druggie, for druggies, but I think that date is in error. It was accepted canonically several hundred years before that....

Cameo-d

In the Netherlands there are still some reformed/ protestand Churches who still don't use the revelation book...

Don't know the exact name of those churches but I renember having descusions with them in the feeldservice.

I thought one of them is named Church of artikle.....( and then a number)

I can try to find out for you...

Very interesting, Dutchstef! I had not heard of that.

ATJeff: Do you have any research to confirm date of cannonization? I don't think it's for druggies. I do think there is a scripted plan encoded. And it's not from a benevolent god.

Revelation prophecies of armageddon and sorting out the earth etc are very conflicting with 'you die and get a heaven or hell ticket' doctrine. So yes they are not popular but date wise of when they were actually written puts them firmly still within inspiration period of the first century. Unlike the hebrew scriptures greek books are all confirmed on early date when they were written since the appocrypha were written later.

Reniaa

Renaii: "they are not popular but date wise of when they were actually written puts them firmly still within inspiration period of the first century"

Documentation, please? Need source.

In the ORIGINAL "All Scripture is Inspired" book, the Society admitted that the Revelation was accepted as part of the Bible by church tradition.  Revelation is asserted as written by the Apostle, "this MUST BE the apostle John."  yet nowhere in the book is this stated.

However according to my reference books the Greek of Revelation is dreadful.  Since the Apostles are described in Acts as uneducated and ordinary, I dont find it surprising.  John was an ignorant fisherman.

The inspiration or otherwise of the book is another thread in itself, but it must be said that since the Gospel of John is a text written in much superior greek, most references spotlight the serious doubt that they could have been written by the same person at the same time. ( 96 for Revelation and 98 for the Gospel.)

Justin Martyr 150 :"one of the apostles of the Christ, prophesied in a Revelation that was given to him." Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria also state this emphatically.

The first definite challenges came in the 3rd century.  Gaius of Rome and Dionysus of Alexandria denied that Revelation could be the work of the Apostle John who wrote the Gospel.  Eusebius hesitated to include it in the canon, showing his uncertainty as to authorship.

According to Prof. H T Andrews the grounds for ascribing it to John the Apostle are no better than the grounds for assigning the Apocalypse of Peter to that apostle.  The style contents and theological outlook of the book are diametrically opposed.  "It is not toomuch to say that if the Gospel and Revelation were written by the same hand , the personality of the author must have completely changed in the interval."

There is nothing in the book that makes a claim to apostolic authorship.  Dionysus of Alexandria suggests John Mark the reputed author of Mark.

"Peak's Commentary on the Bible" is a reference for students of Biblical languages, and so goes into useful detail.

HB

From what I gather, Revelation was not one of the original canoical books because of the controvery and "issues" with authenticity.

There was issues when it was comapred to the Book of Enoch (1Enoch) and how they shared some simalrities.

In regards to the authorship, it has been viewed that the John that wrote the Gospel of John and the letters is not the same John that had the Revelation, the greek in the Gospel and letters is viewed as "beautiful and near perfect", while in Revelations it is not highly regardred, there is also issues with some of the terms used, the word for Lamp in Revelation is not the same one that is used in The Gospel of John.

Having recently (yesterday) had a discussion on this with my JW mother, I decided to look it up on a Catholic encyclopedia:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01594b.htm

Very interesting read.

I won't cut and paste any of it.  Anyone interested in Revelation and needing to speak to a JW about it can use this to point to how JWs have it wrong. 

here's some wiki on it....

The author of Revelation identifies himself several times as "John" (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8). The author also states that he was on the island of Patmos when he received his first vision (1:9; 4:1–2). As a result, the author of Revelation is referred to as John of Patmos. John explicitly addresses Revelation to seven churches of AsiaMinor: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea (1:4, 11). All of these sites are located in what is now Turkey. The traditional view holds that John the Apostle—considered to have written the Gospel and epistles by the same name—was exiled on Patmos in the Aegean archipelago during the reign of Emperor Domitian, and wrote the Revelation there. Those in favor of a single common author point to similarities between the Gospel and Revelation. For example, both works are soteriological (e.g., referring to Jesus as a lamb) and possess a high Christology, stressing Jesus' divine side as opposed to the human side stressed by the Synoptic Gospels. In the Gospel of John and in Revelation, Jesus is referred to as "the Word of God" (? λ?γος το? Θεο?), although the context in Revelation is very different from John. The Word in Rev 19:13 is involved in judgment but in John 1:1, the image is used to speak of a role in creation and redemption.^[10] Explanations of the differences between John's work by proponents of the single-author view include factoring in underlying motifs and purposes, authorial target audience, the author's collaboration with or utilization of different scribes and the advanced age of John the Apostle when he wrote Revelation. Like his Old Testament counterpart Daniel, John is held to have been kept alive to receive the prophetic vision.

A natural reading of the text would reveal that John is writing literally as he sees the vision (Rev 1:11; 10:4; 14:3; 19:9; 21:5) and that he is warned by an angel not to alter the text through a subsequent edit (Rev 22:18-19), in order to maintain the textual integrity of the book.^[11]

[edit]Early views

A number of Church Fathers weighed in on the authorship of Revelation. Justin Martyr avows his belief in its apostolic origin. Irenaeus (178) assumes it as a conceded point. At the end of the 2nd century, we find it accepted at Antioch, by Theophilus, and in Africa by Tertullian. At the beginning of the 3rd century, it is adopted by Clement of Alexandria and by Origen of Alexandria, later by Methodius, Cyprian, and Lactantius. Dionysius of Alexandria (247) rejected it, upon doctrinal rather than critical grounds. Eusebius (315) inclined to class the Apocalypse with the spurious books.^[3]Jerome relegated it to second class.^[3] Most canons included it, but some, especially in the Eastern Church, rejected it. It is wholly absent from the Peshitta.^[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation

calling  Narkissos

do yu have any insight on this one?

Is it possible that Revelation is a latent work conceived sometime a thousand years after the crucifixion and designed as a plan to be implemented?

Could it be that we see the intended implementation coming about and mistake it as "mystical prophecy"?

have you actually looked at the books outside of the canon many you can  tell are just written later talking on there own belief systems like the gnostics. But some are early written maybe. There an early one called didachi that backs up the witnesses, talking about setting up the church and not talking to people who walk away from the belief and calls Jesus 'God's servant' never god. It's a basic work on just being a christian.

Revelation is said to be written by John in his old age which may account for similarities with gospel of john but also the grammatical errors. Most people that discounted it did it on content because it didn't sit well with their trinitarian doctrine rather than origin because it was accepted by the early scholars and widely used.

Reniaa

I ran across a blurb in wiki that stated that the Book of Revelation was long regarded as unauthentic and was not accepted until 1200 A.D.

From Origen onward, a useful distinction was made between "disputed" (e.g. books classed as antilegomena) and "spurious" (e.g. books classed as notha), and Revelation was generally classed among the homolegoumena (the accepted writings) and the antilegomena (as is the case with Gregory of Nazianzus and Nicephorus), although Eusebius also suggests that some place it among the "spurious but not heretical" writings.  I think you mean that it was not universally accepted into the Roman Catholic canon until a late date, although I am not sure if AD 1200 is the correct date.  To this day, it is not accepted into the Nestorian canon.

The rather poor manuscript attestation of Revelation, unlike most other books of the NT, is a reflection of the book's inferior canonical status.  The book also abounds with a plethora of textual uncertainties, many of which represent scribal corrections of the awkward, dialectal Greek of its author.

Revelation prophecies of armageddon and sorting out the earth etc are very conflicting with 'you die and get a heaven or hell ticket' doctrine.

Not so. It may appear that way through Watchtower lenses but this reading (which imports a sense of "survival" of Armageddon not present in the text) is imo exegetically unwarranted. Armageddon concerns all those, great and small, who serve the Beast and who are slated for the destruction reserved for the Beast.  The servants of Christ, meanwhile, are no longer alive on the earth because they have all already been slaughtered by the Beast and those serving him.  They are instead gathered up in heaven as an innumerable "great crowd" (ch. 7) who join their fellow brothers who had been martyred in previous persecutions (ch. 6).  Those who die at the time of the end are precisely constructed as receiving either a heavenly reward (later to be relocated on a "new earth") or eternal torment, on account of their deeds done in life (particularly with respect to receiving the mark of the Beast or the mark of God).

Unlike the hebrew scriptures greek books are all confirmed on early date when they were written since the appocrypha were written later.

As I mentioned in the thread last week, date of composition is not directly related to canonicity. The "Apocrypha" proper are older than the NT and certain books of the OT (particularly, Daniel).  Some books popularly classed with the "New Testament apocrypha" (if that is what you mean) date to the first century, such as 1 Clement, and even the epistles of Ignatius are probably older than some books of the NT.

In regards to the authorship, it has been viewed that the John that wrote the Gospel of John and the letters is not the same John that had the Revelation, the greek in the Gospel and letters is viewed as "beautiful and near perfect", while in Revelations it is not highly regardred, there is also issues with some of the terms used, the word for Lamp in Revelation is not the same one that is used in The Gospel of John.

I think you mean "lamb", but good points, as well as those made by hamsterbait.  Bear in mind too that unlike Revelation, the other "Johannine" books make no authorial claim of having a "John" as their writer.  If it hadn't been for the traditional ascription of the gospel and the epistles, one would probably not find much if not any reason for a common authorship between these and the apocalypse.  And Papias too seems to distinguish between two different Johns, one being called the "elder" (as is the case in 2, 3 John) and the other called the "apostle".

There was issues when it was comapred to the Book of Enoch (1Enoch) and how they shared some simalrities.

The most interesting similarity is Revelation's description of Satan the Devil being bound by an angel and thrown into an abyss.  That is a classic Enochic motif, and unlike anything found in the OT per se.  But it is the millennialism of Revelation, particularly with respect to the Montanist "heresy" of Phrygia, that probably was a major strike against the book, as it was against the writings of Papias (who interestingly appropriated the language of 1 Enoch to give commentary to ch. 12 of Revelation).  The notion of a millennium is also unlike anything in the OT or elsewhere in the NT and which quite possibly reflects (pagan) Zoroastrian influence.  The Zoroastrian connection is particularly noteworthy since the excerpts of the Oracles of Hystaspes preserved by Lactantius show very strong similarities to ch. 11-13 of Revelation.  And the Asia Minor/Phrygian provenance of related prophetic movements (e.g. the prophetess daughters of Philip the evangelist in Hierapolis, the millennialism of Papias who lived in Hierapolis, the Ephesus/Asia Minor setting of Revelation, the Phrygian locale of early Montanism, etc.) is interesting because Phrygia was home to a large Persian community and Roman Mithraism probably originated in Phrygia (as Mithras in artistic depictions dons the cap characteristic of Phrygia).

Renai: "There an early one called didachi that backs up the witnesses, talking about setting up the church and not talking to people who walk away from the belief and calls Jesus 'God's servant' never god. It's a basic work on just being a christian."

How could Jesus be god's servant? He didn't kill anybody.

I think the entire book of Revelation is a fraud!

Revelation does not agree with Jesus' life on earth.

 According to Hebrews 13:  ⁸Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

The Jesus of Revelation must agree 100% with the character exemplified by Jesus when he was on earth.

Jesus cannot be gentle and loving when on earth and then turn into a fierce cold hearted destroyer god in Revelation!

What Jesus does in Revelation must be according to his same character manifested when he was on earth.

It is incongruent.

Revelation is a forged scripted document. It is not believable as any testimony of truth.

I believe it reveals a diabolical plan that will be attempted to be put in motion by an evil group of people. I do not believe that this plan originates with humans. But I do believe they are being used to execute it.

my mom told me the other day that in the good old days some people would go to fortune tellers. these people had the ability to do

"hexes" on people. they gave you some powder or liquid and you would have to put in their drinks or such.

after much conversation we came to the conclusion that these "fortune tellers" were masters of using drugs!

drugs have been around for millennia. whoever wrote this wonderful fantasy ala lord of the rings style did some wonderful drugs.

even eating scrolls must of been euphoric

John I believe is the John related to Jesus (ie. Jesus and James literal brother). Since we are speaking about Jews and Jewish society, we should realize that since forever the sons were sent to school to learn to read and write. They are big on basic education.

They may have been fisherman, carpenters, and what not but they were not illiterate.

I can't really add anything to what Leo said, except to reiterate that the inclusion of Revelation in the Bible canon was disputed and as such it was left out of certain canonical lists.

"Revelation prophecies of armageddon and sorting out the earth etc are very conflicting with 'you die and get a heaven or hell ticket' doctrine." 

Reniaa - I would suggest exactly the opposite. Revelation is used to very much support the "hell ticket" with its statements of burning forever in the lake of fire and sulphur.

Revelation also clearly identifies paradise as being heavenly.

Revelation 2:7 "Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations: To him that conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God."

The Watchtower identifies this as heaven.

Insight on the Scriptures, Volume 2 p.576 Paradise "Eating in "the Paradise of God." Revelation 2:7 mentions a "tree of life" in "the paradise of God" and that eating from it would be the privilege of the one "that conquers." Since other promises given in this section of Revelation to such conquering ones clearly relate to their gaining a heavenly inheritance (Re 2:26-28; 3:12, 21), it seems evident that "the paradise of God" in this case is a heavenly one." 

Revelation 21:4 works better with traditional Christian doctrine than Watchtower doctrine as the concept of a "New heaven and New Earth" do not indicate the planet will survive forever as Witnesses like to believe.