John the Revelator

[Dandelion_Wine]

I went to a Bible-study given by our pastor. He said that most likely John the apostle was not the writer of the Apocalypse. It was “probably” someone from the “school of John”.

Interestingly enough, later he was commenting on the letters to the 7 churches and how whoever wrote the Apocalypse must have been a man of great influence over these churches to be able to say such things.

Well if I put that statement with the question of who is the author along w/ what ‘tradition’ has to say…

Anyway, I’m looking for a good book that deals with such issues. Any recommendations?

 

[Fidelis]

I went to a Bible-study given by our pastor. He said that most likely John the apostle was not the writer of the Apocalypse. It was “probably” someone from the “school of John”.

Interestingly enough, later he was commenting on the letters to the 7 churches and how whoever wrote the Apocalypse must have been a man of great influence over these churches to be able to say such things.

Well if I put that statement with the question of who is the author along w/ what ‘tradition’ has to say…

Anyway, I’m looking for a good book that deals with such issues. Any recommendations?

You probably don’t want an entire book on the authorship by John of the Biblical books that bear his name, but many good commentaries that don’t ascribe to the modernist position on this point to the fact that he did write these books. Mostly they base their evidence on the internal literary style, the testimony of early Church tradition, and majority opinion of all biblical scholars, not just those that lived in the last 150 years or so.

I’d recommend the Navarre Bible Commentaries on John, the Book of Revelation, and the Catholic Epistles (which include John’s three epistles), the Ignatius Study Bible on John’s Gospel, and “Coming Soon,” a study on the Book of Revelation by Michael Barber.

You may want to start with this Catholic Answers article on the Book of Revelation by Antonio Fuentes, the general editor of the aforementioned Navarre Bible Commentary Series:
catholic.com/thisrock/1995/9510ntg.asp

An excerpt:

THE last book in the biblical canon of the New Testament is the book of the Apocalypse (= Revelation), written by John toward the end of the reign of Emperor Domitian (A.D. 95), when he was in exile on the island of Patmos. John s authorship is affirmed by Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and the Muratori fragment really by the entire tradition of the Church from the second century forward. The doctrine contained in this book and that in the fourth Gospel run parallel to each other, but naturally the two books differ in language and style because they belong to different genres. To give just one example: John is the only inspired New Testament writer to call our Lord the Logos, a description which we find both in the Apocalypse and in the fourth Gospel. Also both books have a pronounced preference for contrasts, such as light and darkness, truth and lies, life and death, the Lamb and the Beast, Jerusalem and Babylon, the archangel Michael and the Dragon.

 

[lak611]

From the Catholic Encyclopedia: 'The author of the Apocalypse calls himself John. “John to the seven churches which are in Asia” (Ap., i, 4). And again, “I, John, your brother and your partner in tribulation . . . was in the island which called Patmos, for the word of God” (i, 9).

The Seer does not further specify his personality. But from tradition we know that the Seer of the Apocalypse was John the Apostle the son of Zebedee, the Beloved Disciple of Jesus. At the end of the second century the Apocalypse was acknowledged by the historical representatives of the principal churches as the genuine work of John the Apostle.’ newadvent.org/cathen/01594b.htm