Academic Trends in Dating Revelation

[darinhouston]

Thanks -- I found a relevant section in Gentry's book and this may be what I'm looking for.

[MsCread]

My two cents worth
Nobody has mentioned the role archaeology is playing; maybe archaeology will be involved in the increasing of knowledge?

slaves4christ has a wonderful video on his channel entitled “The Dead Sea Scrolls – confirming the text of the Bible is unchanged over time by Dr. Don Patton.

He talks about how in AD66 when the Jews revolted against Rome that they hid the scrolls in the caves on the Qumran Plateau

In AD68 the Roman 10th Legion destroyed the settlement where the caves were.

I think there are eleven caves and they want to excavate more but are fighting tooth and nail for permission to do so.

They found fragments of all the OT books except Esther but it is referenced and 12 scrolls were written in Paleo Hebrew

NT fragments written in Greek.

If they could excavate more they might just find some fragments from Revelation!

Proving it was written before 70AD as the settlement was destroyed in 68AD.

I think archaeology is going to play a role in our knowledge being increased!

[dwilkins]

I'm optimistic about the role that archaeology can play in this.

An additional line of study should be analysis of the New Testament epistles for references to Revelation. It's my proposal (via Ed Steven's work on the compilation of the canon) that Revelation was written in the winter of 62-63AD. Conservative, but traditional, dating of some of Paul's, Peter's, and Jame's works put them a few years later. If we looked through those epistles would we find references to the writers having read Revelation?

The following might be examples from a few books:

Ephesians: Paul's predestination seems to be associated with his role as a prophet and Apostle. He switches from "we" when talking about his role (and possibly that of his Apostalic team) to "you" in chapter 1, which has some dramatic implications for the doctrine of predestination and other elements of soteriology. Another Pauline passage in the New Testament that makes a detailed comment on predestination is from Romans 8 (I think everyone sees Romans as being written before 62AD, so there might be an element of private revelation involved as well). There, persecuted people (I'd propose martyrs) were predestined (past tense) to be glorified. In Revelation, we see the only group of people to explicitly be told that their full number was foreknown and predestined by God: The martyrs under the alter. Did Paul get his idea of predestination from the full number of martyrs that had to be filled up before the Day of the Lord? In addition, did Paul just make up the image of a length, breadth, width, and height associated with Christian blessing? Or, might this have been a vague reference to the New Jerusalem (which is described on the one hand as the Bride, and on the other hand as containing the Temple.

Hebrews: The image of the heavenly city, to which all of the faithful of all time have an interest, sounds suspiciously like the New Jerusalem. In Hebrews 11-12 it is the home of the departed saints and the hope of those still on earth.

James: James' prophecy against the rich sounds suspiciously like the description of the Whore, Babylon. Since it's my stance that Mystery Babylon was the Jewish nation founded on Jerusalem in the 60's AD I think this might be good argument that James was making the same argument.

2nd Peter: The whole epistle seems to me to be a commentary on Revelation. The topics covered are listed as the same order as Revelation, so that either John based Revelation on 2nd Peter, or Peter based his epistle on Revelation. I'd argue that Peter did so to explain the important parts of Revelation to his audience immediately before his death.

I expect that an exhaustive search for such evidence would bring up a lot more.

Doug

[Singalphile]

MsCread wrote:
If they could excavate more they might just find some fragments from Revelation!
Proving it was written before 70AD as the settlement was destroyed in 68AD.

It seems natural to think that anything worth finding has been found, but maybe not. That would be quite interesting and exciting!