usages of words, phrases, tenses, and so on, comparing them with corresponding usages in the other Johannine books. Of the conclusions drawn we shall speak later; at the moment we are concerned with the labour involved. Such results are not to be gathered in a few minutes from dictionaries or concordances; they can only come from repeated re-readings of the documents with a single eye to each particular feature which is the subject of investigation. And often the work is complicated by intricate textual questions as to the correct reading.

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What, then, are the results? Our first questions relate to authorship and date. The Christian Apocalypse, unlike others, is not pseudonymous. It claims to be by one John,' and Dr Charles urges strongly and rightly that we must accept the claim. But who was this John? Here we enter upon one of the most disputed and complex questions, a question which affects not only the Apocalypse but the other co-called Johannine writings of the New Testament, the Gospel and the three Epistles. A full discussion of this question is not possible here; but it may be useful to give the reader some idea of the situation. It is not a case where criticism interferes arbitrarily to upset an unequivocal claim made by our documents or the consistent evidence of early tradition.

Briefly, the data on which criticism has to work are these: none of these books claim to be written by the Apostle, the son of Zebedee. The Apocalyptist describes himself as your brother and partaker with you in tribulation'; he speaks of himself as a prophet, and of the apostles as a separate body. The second and third Epistles are by an unknown Presbyter or Elder; the first Epistle is anonymous; the Gospel is apparently by an unnamed 'disciple whom Jesus loved.' From the end of the second century all these were ascribed, with some hesitation as to the Apocalypse, to John, the son of Zebedee. But in earlier Christian literature the case is not so clear. There is evidence of at least two Johns

at Ephesus. In a In a well-known passage, quoted by Eusebius, Papias speaks in the same sentence of a John who figures in a list of apostles, and also of an elder' John, who is coupled with Aristion. Eusebius accepts the statement and says that it is confirmed by Vol. 235.-No. 467.

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the existence in his own time of two tombs in Ephesus bearing the name of John. While, then, there is general agreement that the Gospel and, generally, the other Johannine literature were written by a John of Ephesus, there is considerable hesitation in identifying him sans phrase with the apostle, the son of Zebedee, who figures in the Gospels. Even Irenæus, though he implies the identification, always calls John the disciple of the Lord, or some such name; never the Apostle,' or the son of Zebedee.

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There is, further, some evidence that the apostle was martyred by the Jews, almost certainly before 70, in which case he cannot be the aged John whom we hear of at Ephesus, or the author of any of the books in question, since these date from the end of the first century A.D. This evidence of martyrdom, which is certainly slight, is usually brushed aside altogether; but Dr Charles lays weight upon it, the point being that once the Ephesian John had been identified with the apostle, as was the case by the close of the second century, the e contradictory evidence of martyrdom would disappear.

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Further, on internal grounds, it is difficult to ascribe all the Johannine books to the same writer. Ideas, style, and language make it difficult, in spite of some points of contact, to believe that the Apocalypse and the Gospel to come from the same hand. We may note especially the difference found in the attitude towards eschatology. In the Gospel the coming of Christ and the Judgment are spiritualised; they have already taken place in the in experience of the believing soul. In the Apocalypse the ty eschatology is consistently regarded under its popular and external aspects; a literal and immediate judgments

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* The references to the date of Galatians on pp. xlix f. are not very clear. The Epistle cannot be dated as late as 64 A.D., and in any case the important point is the reference to John the Apostle in ch. ii as indicating that he was alive at the time of the events there described, i.e. at the Council of Jerusalem in 49 A.D., or more probably at an earlier conference. the In other words, so far as the evidence of Galatians goes, John may have been martyred, if he was martyred, any time after 50 A.D. This does not, however, affect Dr Charles' general position.

† The question of the date of the Apocalypse is complicated; but Dr Charles agrees both with the earliest external evidence and with the conclusions of most modern scholars in placing it in the last years of Domitian's reign.

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and end of the world are expected. All this was seen by Dionysius of Alexandria, who died A.D. 265, and is widely recognised. But Dr Charles, by his investigation of the language and usages of the different books, has made the difference of authorship almost indisputable; in particular he has shown conclusively that the theory which attributes the second and third Epistles to the writer of the Apocalypse is impossible. His view is that the Gospel and the three Epistles belong together and come from the Presbyter; while the Apocalypse is by an otherwise unknown John, a prophet who migrated late in life from Galilee, the home of Apocalyptic,* to Ephesus. All the books, therefore, come from the same school; and this fact sufficiently explains the linguistic and theological agreements between them. Dr Charles, then, agrees with the majority of modern critics in separating the books; he differs from the right wing in assigning neither to the Apostle, whom he regards as having suffered an early martyrdom.

In other respects he is by no means an adherent of the left wing. There are inconsistencies, repetitions, and varying points of view in the Apocalypse which have suggested to many critics that the work, as we have it, is a combination of sources of various dates, some Jewish, some Christian, some originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, others in Greek. And on this basis the fascinating game of disentangling the sources has gone on merrily; but with no very convincing result. Dr Charles disagrees with this method, and his main reason is derived from the meticulous analysis of language and style already referred to. This shows that, with a few exceptions, the book is a real unity, and represents, as it stands, the mind of the author, not of an editor who has pieced together disjointed and half-understood fragments.

This matter of style is very important and significant, because the Apocalypse is so peculiar in this respect. It is customary to speak of it as very bad Greek, the worst in the New Testament. And so, from one point

Granting that Galilee rather than Judæa was the home of Apocalyptic, the conclusion that the writer of any given Apocalypse was a Galilean can only be probable; there may have been exceptions. But the point is not of great importance.

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of view, it is; we find nominatives in apposition to accusatives, neuter nouns followed by masculine participles, and similar solecisms. The usual remarks about what would happen to the Fourth Form boy may be taken for granted; and we go on to ask, under Dr Charles' guidance, whether all this is due to ignorance and carelessness. Ignorance, in a sense, yes; but care-t lessness, no. The grammar is clearly that of one to whom Greek remains a foreign tongue; it is also that of one accustomed to think in Hebrew. Granting this, it is self-consistent and extraordinarily effective. It is not, as old commentators used to say, the Greek of the Holy Ghost, with the implication that grammar is superfluous in Heaven; but the Greek of a Jew of Galilee T who thinks in his native tongue and translates directly into the foreign medium which he must use if his message the is to reach his hearers. Dr Charles points out that Prof. Moulton, who in the light of his study of the vernacular Greek of the Papyri had denied the existence t of Hebraisms in the Apocalypse, afterwards came to his own view.

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But while there is this general unity of style, the writer has not spun his material out of his own head Like most other ancient and modern writers, he is indebted to predecessors in the same field, and sometimes has incorporated considerable sections of their work. He has used 'sources,' i.e. visions of previous seers. These comprise nearly one-fifth of the work; some being in Greek, others in Hebrew or Aramaic. The chief are chaps. vii 1-8, xi 1-13, xii, xiii, xvii, xviii. These however, have all been recast and adapted, so as to become an integral part of the general scheme. In other words, the book is not a patch-work of inconsistent writings clumsily placed together by a compiler, but a real unity. In the case of the 'Letters to the Seven Churches' (ch. ii-iv) Dr Charles holds that these were originally written by John himself before the outbreak of a universal persecution, and were worked in at the time of the final writing of the book, which, as we have seen, he places under Domitian.

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But though there is this general unity we do not escape altogether from the sinister figure of an 'editor

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ia Dr Charles holds that the book was left unfinished; the writer died suddenly or perhaps was martyred, and an unintelligent pupil gave it its final revision. Sometimes he transposed and misplaced verses, e.g. xviii 20 to end. In viii 7-12 what were originally Three Woes or Trumpets have been transformed into seven, by the addition of Four Woes at the beginning. The first scheme was one of Seven Seals, Three Trumpets, and Seven Bowls. The added Trumpets are commonplace, and repeat what has already occurred under the Seals.

A further important addition is to be found in xiv 3–4. To the picture of the hundred and forty and four thousand of the redeemed before the Throne, the editor adds the description,These are they who were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.' It is impossible to explain away these words. As they stand they imply an exaggerated and even heretical regard for celibacy which would have excluded Peter and other Apostles from the number of the Redeemed on Mount Zion. Another addition is found in verses 15-17 of the same chapter, which represents the judgment as the Harvest, and only doubles the picture in the following verses where it is depicted as the Ingathering of the Vintage. As the passage stands the first act is ascribed to Christ, the Son of man, the second to an angel, and 'the Son of man is treated as an angel, a conception impossible not only in the Apocalypse, but in Jewish and Christian literature as a whole.'

But far the most important traces of the editor's work are to be found in the last three chapters. These, in particular, it is suggested, were left in a very fragmentary state, and have been put together in such a clumsy way that no one has been able to discover any real sequence of thought in them. We shall say something about this later. Other minor passages should be added to this list; but, lest the influence of the editor should be exaggerated, we may remark that the additions he has made, according to Dr Charles' view, come to no more than twenty-two verses. This faithful disciple comes off rather badly at Dr Charles' hands.

He is an arch-heretic' and 'betrays a depth of stupidity all but incomprehensible.' 'The irony of it is that, despite his abysmal stupidity and heresies, he has achieved immortality