John of Patmos: A Controversial but Possible Portrait

WHO WAS THE AUTHOR OF REVELATION?

It was during the latter half of the first century that a man prepared to embark on a short voyage to an insignificant island in the Mediterranean. Ordinary as the trip must have seemed to his fellow travelers, it was destined to cause ripples in history that have still not abated.

The man called himself John, and the departing port was most likely Ephesus, a bustling city of almost half a million. The greatest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World dominated its prosperous life: the famed Temple of Artemis. No doubt John heard the Ephesians quote the poet Antipater, who had seen the wall of lofty Babylon on which was a road for chariots, who had visited the hanging gardens, and the magnificent statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the Colossus of Rhodes, and the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus. But when he saw the house of Artemis reaching to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and he declared, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on anything so grand.”

John, however, was not impressed. He was longing for the time when this temple would come crashing down. Soon, he hoped.

All this luxury, all this grandeur—he was sick of it. He couldn’t bear the tunes of the harpists and minstrels, flutists and trumpeters celebrating the gods. He hated the sight of people dressed in fine linen of purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, jewels, and pearls.

Showing off. Clamoring. Living.

The sound of the millstone filled the air. Lights shown through the windows of houses in which artists pursued their craft. In a courtyard adorned with flowers, a bridegroom and a bride laughed in celebration, their friends and family clapping joyously.

“It will all be silenced. It will all be thrown down,” John might have mumbled to himself as he shielded his eyes from the opulence around him and made for the harbor.

But it was no better there. The port was the hubbub of commerce. Merchants ordered servants around to load and unload cargo: iron, bronze, silver, gold, silk, and cloth; scented wood, ivory, and marble; cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots. And slaves. Human lives.

Did John only think of condemning this thriving culture when he arrived at the isolation of the island? Perhaps. Or perhaps even now he spoke under his breath: “All your dainties and your splendor will be lost to you, never to be found again. You will all weep and mourn. All you shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and merchants—you will all cry at the loss of your riches. It will happen. Soon. And then it will be my time to rejoice.”

John, we have to understand, was a radical. He deemed the materialism of affluent Roman society an enemy of God. But not only that. He also ran counter to many of his fellow Christians. It appears that he had just visited the cities that lay along the main commerce road of what is now western Turkey, and he had found the state of the church appalling.

Laodicea, for one, that center of wool trade and monetary transaction. Had not the Master said that you cannot serve both God and Mammon? Well, the Christians there were trying to serve both, John thought. Rich and satisfied, they were. Spiritually lukewarm. If they did not renounce this world, the Master would spit them out of His mouth. They would go to the place where all worshippers of Mammon were going.

The same in Sardis. With few exceptions, the whole church was spiritually dead. Unless they became more radical and stopped being out to gain the acceptance of society, their names would be blotted out of the Book of Life.

And in Thyatira he had met a woman teacher whose Christianity was so liberal that she even encouraged others to eat the normal meat from the marketplace, which had been sacrificed to idols. God was bound to intervene soon, though. She and all her followers would feel the brunt of God’s disciplinary action, of this John was sure.

Similar teachings were spreading in Pergamum, and in the great metropolis Ephesus the Christians were so caught up in their daily lives that they had lost their initial zeal for God.

But there was hope. A minority of believers was not under the spell of Mammon. They were poor and vulnerable in this world, yet strong in God. Some of them lived radically enough to suffer persecution, such as the dear believers in Philadelphia and Smyrna, who had run into repeated problems with the local synagogue leaders. And in Pergamum one Christian had even been killed for his faith, just like Jesus. A martyr.

In John’s view, the church needed more martyrs: people who were willing to live in direct opposition to their own culture. Some were doing it, and they had to be encouraged, but all the others needed a wake-up call. “Come out of her, my people!”—This was the message the Christians needed to hear. “Separate yourself from the godless society around you, from the money and luxury, the feasting and singing, the marrying and toiling. Come out and seek the Lord!”

This, at least, John intended to do on the island to which he was headed. The ship was leaving the harbor now, and already he was feeling better as the noises of the merchants were swept away by the wind of the open sea. After months of pagan city life, God’s sun shining on the clear turquoise of the Mediterranean water must have felt to John like a welcoming presence from on high.

Yes, he was going to Patmos, one of many small islands between Macedonia and Asia Minor. Hardly anyone was living there. Solitude.

Why he was going? Well, he himself only said it was “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9). This might mean that he was banished there by the Roman authorities for having stirred up too much trouble on behalf of the Christian message. It is doubtful, however, that someone who did not hold any influential position in the empire would be silenced by exile. Senators, relatives of the emperor, government officials, high ladies, famous poets and philosophers—all those might for one reason or another be sent into exile. But some leader of what was seen as merely a quarrel within Judaism? Someone who was most likely not even a Roman citizen, such as Paul had been? There were more expedient ways to silence a non-citizen quarrel maker.

Still, one shouldn’t rule it out. There could have been factors we are not aware of.

But it is equally possible that the phrase “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” simply means that John went to Patmos voluntarily in order to seek God. One clear message in the Book of Revelation is that Christians ought to separate themselves from Roman society, which John viewed as being on the brim of destruction. What better way of putting his own message into practice than fleeing the madness himself? And what more convincing place from which to write such a message than a remote island?

The Lukewarm Reception of Revelation

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.

- Revelation 1:1-3

No other book in the Bible begins with such a pronounced claim of divine authorship. In essence, John is telling the reader: “Make no mistake. This is from God. And He has something important to say for the very near future, here and now in the first century.”

Such a confident claim forced people throughout the ages to make a definite decision on the book. You either had to embrace it or reject it. Completely. The one thing John did not leave open for you was to appreciate it in a differentiated, half-accepting manner. Hot or cold, but not lukewarm – that’s the effect John was going for.

The only problem is that if you mix hot and cold, lukewarm is precisely what you get. That, at least, has been the overall reception of the book by Christians from the second century onward. Some embraced Revelation as their favorite text; others rejected it as not being from God at all.

The result was that the father of church historians, Eusebius, listed it as a disputed book around the year 300. Some Bibles did not print it as late as the seventeenth century, and even today it remains the only book of the New Testament that – though officially accepted in the canon – is excluded from the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

That is a rather lukewarm reception, wouldn’t you say?

Why Martin Luther Rejected the Book of Revelation

(Picture copyright by Jacob Schriftman. Do not use without permission.)

The Book of Revelation contains one of the longest quotes of Jesus Himself—a quote, furthermore, that was supposedly written down only moments after He uttered it.

The Gospels were composed decades after Jesus’ life. It would be a mistake to read them as transcripts of Jesus’ teachings, as if the authors based their records on tape recordings rather than oral transmission. The author of Luke, for instance, simply said that he had done his proper research; he did not claim to transcribe Jesus verbatim.

John’s Revelation, on the other hand, does make that claim. Jesus appears in awe-inspiring power and tells John to write down what he is about to receive, and then He launches into a lengthy monologue. Here we have Jesus actually dictating part of the Bible to a human secretary.

Yet, what kind of a Jesus do we meet in these messages? Is it the same Jesus whom so many Christians have grown to love by reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? The Jesus who upset the religious purists by reaching out to sinners and rejects? The one who usually reserved His reprimands to legalists who thought it terribly important to eat kosher food and keep the Sabbath, while ignoring that God’s commandments were meant to help people?

It can be argued, and many Christians in fact have argued, that the Jesus of Revelation is quite a different Jesus than the one in the Gospels and in Paul’s letters. In the Gospels, Jesus condemns an overemphasis on purity, kosher living, as well as misguided religious zeal. In Revelation, He condemns the lack of purity, kosher living, and religious zeal. Legalism seems to have suddenly disappeared as an item on His list of concerns. In the Gospels, He wins over the sinners by accepting them with open arms; now He attempts to reform them by saying that they make Him sick and He will throw them up.

In a word, you could say there is a lack of grace in Revelation. Here, grace is reserved for those who deserve grace, which really makes it no grace at all. Grace means to get something you do not deserve—a theme that runs like a golden thread through the Gospels and Paul’s letters. In Revelation, some say, this golden thread breaks off. Now we are back to the concept of reward rather than grace: getting what you deserve.

That is why Martin Luther, the man who sparked the Reformation, said that Revelation is no prophecy from God at all and that “Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” He later changed his mind, but it seems that such was his view at the time when he distributed his ninety-five theses, which set the greatest shift in the history of the church in motion.

Are Christians today still at liberty to draw the same conclusion about Revelation as Martin Luther did? Or would they be then labeled by many of their fellow Christians as unbelievers, or at least as people spreading false teachings?