ChuckE99

That's something I've wondered after going through the book a couple times. Was Revelation actually the first of the New Testament books to be written?

(First, a disclaimer: I'm not a biblical scholar, just a layman, so feel free to ignore this post altogether.)

I think what you have in Revelation are two manuscripts joined together: The Letters to the Seven Churches, which is a later addition, and a core, earlier apocalyptic document about "The Lamb of God", not Jesus Christ. In fact, reading it, I get the sense that "in Christ Jesus" seems to be sprinkled in a few times (I think about seven times) to a document that is otherwise about a goat-headed, seven-eyed Christ figure.

I guess I'm wondering if there is any scholarly work out there that suggests that this core document might have been written earlier than the rest of the books of the NT, and certainly earlier than Paul's letters? It wouldn't surprise me either way.

Toto

Revelation is usually dated around 90 CE. People who chose a late date for the gospels see it as one of the earliest Christian documents.

You might be interested in Earl Doherty's take: Revelation: The Gospel According to the Prophet John

the_cave

FWIW Bernhard Muller talks about this, quoting the old editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Jewish Encyclopedia on the subject:

http://www.geocities.com/b_d_muller/rjohn.html

Muller gets other things wrong I think and I'm not sure how to tackle his claims, but there seems to be something to the idea. Not sure what it means.

spamandham

It's possible. The dates are uncertain enough to accommodate that idea.

Personally though, it seems to me that the 'last shall be first' doctrine is actually just a repetition of the OT idea that the second born son would triumph.

In regards to Christianity specifically, it would have been a great propaganda line for catholicizing apologists to use against everyone else. If you take this perspective, then you would naturally date such statements to the time period in which syncretism was rampant - the mid 2nd century on.

jules?

Revelation may have been written late or early but the source material determines it to be a foundation of christian. The end was nigh and the saviour was coming. Christians have spent a couple of thousand years trying to distance themselves from the apocalyptic cult it grew out of but dispite the effort Revelation still will not go away. They didn't want it in the canon but it got in because it is what christianity really is. The fundys are really more Christian than Catholics.

ChuckE99

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I'll check into Dougherty's book. "The Last Shall Be First" title I gave the thread is just a play on the saying. I'm not suggesting that the actual saying refers to the true order of books in the NT.

XKV8R

no. it wasn't written first. in fact, for a while there was doubt that it would be included in the christian canon.

S.C.Carlson

Is the number of the beast in your core document? Most scholars understand that as a reference to Nero, yet scholars date some of Paul's (authentic) letters before Nero's reign.

Stephen

jules?

In 1895 excavations of a dump in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus produced 400,000 scraps of papyri which were unfortunately illegible. New techniques have now revealed their contents and one papyrus was an early copy of Revelation dating from 300 where the number is 616 [not the number of the neighbour of the beast!]. David Parker, Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Paleography at the University of Birmingham [a principle researcher on the project] says that this example of gematria refers to the beast as being Emperor Caligula and not Nero. Caligula ruled from 37 to 41 therefore his reference in Revelations makes it possibly the earliest Christian document. As time moved on Caligula could no longer represent the beast so in typical midrash tradition a slight alteration made Nero [reign 54- 68] the new anti-Christ with the addition of the preface chastising the seven churches a further updating to make the document relevant to the growing faith

S.C.Carlson

You're referring to P115. Parker did not mention the Caligula interpretation in his New Testament Studies article about the papyrus fragment: "A new Oxyrhynchus Papyrus of Revelation: P115 (P. Oxy. 4499)," NTS 46 (2000):159-174, although some journalists have quoted him as suggesting it.

616 fits Nero very well too -- much better, in fact, than the possibilities Wikipedia suggested for Caligula.

Stephen