Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 21:83 (Jul 1864)
Article: The Author Of The Apocalypse
Author: R. D. C. Robbins

BSac 21:83 (July 1864) p. 551

The Author Of The Apocalypse

Prof. R. D. C. Robbins

(Continued from No. 82, page 347.)

II. Internal Argument

1. Proof that John the Apostle was the Author of the Apocalypse from Declarations in the Book itself

The author of the book repeatedly indicates that his name is John (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8).

This has been adduced as an objection to the authorship of John the evangelist, since he nowhere gives his name in the Gospel and Epistles. But there was in them no occasion to name himself specifically. The authors of neither of the Gospels deem it necessary to make themselves conspicuous. But if a vision is seen or a revelation made, the one to whom the revelation is made or by whom the vision is seen is naturally designated. So it was with the Hebrew prophets: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz”; “the word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw”; “the word that came unto Jeremiah from the Lord”; “a vision appeared unto me, even unto me, Daniel”; and so times almost without number, in the different prophets. Here the designation is, “to his servant John,” merely indicating his relation to the Saviour in his exaltation, just as in the Gospel he calls himself, in relation to his intercourse with the Saviour on earth, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” the one “who leaned on Jesus’s bosom.” The immediate designation in the first verse is, as Hengstenberg well says, not of John as apostle, but as prophet, and yet “we are conducted indirectly to the apostleship, since revelations of such high importance as those contained here were not given beyond the limits of the apostleship, and could not have been given, without shaking the foundation of the apostolic dignity.”1

BSac 21:83 (July 1864) p. 552

The fact that no other designation is given with the name John, both in verse first and fourth, is a strong argument in favor of the apostolic authorship. There may have been others in the region who had the same name with the apostle; but there certainly was no one who was generally known. That “shadow of a man,” called John the presbyter or elder, is plainly cast from the designation of “elder,” given by John to himself in his second and third epistles, and deepened and endued with life by the wrong interpretation of a passage of Papias by Eusebius,2 and an obscure tradition hunted up by Dionysius to give some consistency to his denial of apostolical authority ...