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The Authoress Of Revelation — a Conjecture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2011
Extract
Of what value is a pure conjecture, unverified, perhaps unverifiable? In the face of possible disparagement we answer, Much every way. A conjecture is the most concrete and tangible form of the working hypothesis. When directed at some important yet knotty point of criticism it coördinates and articulates the data, narrowing the question down to sharply definable points. It is the oxyacetylene blowpipe of historical inquiry. It may be misdirected, but if so is promptly quenched. If rightly applied it goes to the heart of the matter. Criticism in this form laughs at the epithet ‘destructive’. Discarding the defensive armor of negative propositions it comes boldly forth into the open, flinging down its challenge of pointed affirmation and defying disproof. As long as its challenge remains unanswered it serves to rouse debate from the lethargy of stagnation. Accepted or rejected, it stimulates to new energy the forces of liberalism and conservatism alike. In the end it works inevitably for the truth. Against the truth it can do nothing.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1930
References
1 Three preëminent authorities, Harnack, Wellhausen, and Charles, to mention no others, have expressed the conviction that the Christian element for large portions of the central mass of Revelation is a very thin and superficial veneer covering purely Jewish apocalypse. Now we have no extant evidence, unless by inference from the sobriquet ‘Sons of Wrath’ (Boanerges: cf. Lk. 9, 54), rendered ‘Sons of Thunder’ in Mk. 3, 17, to show that John the Apostle was more gifted in ‘prophecy’ than others of the Twelve, though the names of Agabus, Judas, and Silas are sufficient warrant for the belief that the Judaean church was exceptionally well endowed in this respect.
On the other hand it is of record that the greatest Jewish teacher of the period, a strict contemporary of the Apostles, who escaped with his disciples to the camp of Vespasian during the siege of Jerusalem to become afterwards chief founder of the celebrated school of ‘Teachers’ (Tannaim) at Jamnia, one who by a curious coincidence bore the same name as the Apostle, was notoriously given to the apocalyptic type of teaching.
For a Christian ‘prophetess’ at Caesarea it may well have been a matter of no small difficulty to differentiate between reported teachings of John the son of Zebedee and teachings of John the'son of Zacchaeus (Johanan ben Zacchai), also reported to her at Caesarea from Jerusalem during the same period and from Jamnia thereafter during her residence in Asia.