From: "Alice Turner" <akt@attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v028.n185
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 23:56:40 

Rostrum rote:

> On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Richard Horton wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Apr 2000 06:10:41 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
> > >Even fewer people know there is no such book as "RevelationS". :-) It's
> > >the Revelation of St. John, or the Apocalypse of St. John, or Revelation,
> > >or Apocalypse, or The Revelation of Jesus Christ.
> > 
> > Attributing it to "St. John" is controversial as well, as contemporary
> > scholarship seems to agree that John of Patmos, the author of
> > Revelation, is not the apostle John.
> 
> I don't think "contemporary scholarship" is that monolithic.  A lot of
> those authorship debates seem to me to be based on too little evidence.
> Some of the arguments I've seen for that position could be used to prove
> that the Gene Wolfe who wrote the New Sun books is not the same person who
> wrote the Long Sun books (significant stylistic differences, a large chunk
> of vocabulary unique to one series or the other, different tehological
> ideas and concerns, etc.)

The scholarship is not that "contemporary" regarding Revelation. It was suspect from the gitgo, with several more sober bishops strongly objecting to it when the 4th century canon was put together. It crawled in because of popular superstition that John the gospeleer wrote it, though  more educated folk with a good "ear" even at that early time found this highly unlikely, and said so. There were lots of similarly apocalyptic texts around, this one being an anti-Rome rant with historical references to Babylon, Israel's prior primo peeve. Modern textual analysis makes the two completely incompatible. "John of Patmos" is the name given to the unknown author of what Harold Bloom (and his insignificant follower, me) call a "rancid" book. OTOH, as a heathen, I do think that it has pepped up the religion considerably! For TV evangelists, say, suicidal cults, and plenty of morons everywhere!

-alga




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