Who wrote the book of Revelation?

What the book says about its author

The author gives his name four times, and only his first name (Revelation 1:1, 1:4, 1:9 and 22:8).

I John, your brother and partner with you in the oppression, Kingdom, and perseverance in Christ Jesus, was on the isle that is called Patmos because of God’s Word and the testimony of Jesus Christ.

He calls himself a servant and a brother, and his book “the words of the prophecy” (Revelation 1:3). He writes to seven churches in Roman Asia, today’s western Turkey, as someone they know well. He never claims to be an apostle or to have walked with Jesus in Galilee. When he sees the new Jerusalem, its foundations carry “twelve names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb” (Revelation 21:14), a line that sounds odd from one of the twelve himself. Patmos is a small island about 100 kilometers off Ephesus. Rome often banished troublemakers to such islands, and early tradition says John was exiled there.

Apostle or another John?

The tradition is early. Around 155, Justin Martyr names the author as John, one of the apostles of Christ (Dialogue with Trypho 81). Irenaeus, about 180, agrees, and so the church came to see him as John son of Zebedee, the Galilean fisherman also credited with a Gospel and three letters.

Doubts are early too. Around 250, Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, compared the books with care. The Gospel of John is written in smooth, correct Greek; Revelation is rough, full of Hebrew turns of phrase and grammatical slips. The two books use different words and think in different ways. So, he concluded, they came from two men, both named John, a common name, and he noted that two tombs at Ephesus were each called John’s (Eusebius, Church History 7.25). Most scholars today side with Dionysius: John of Patmos was probably a Jewish Christian prophet, steeped in the Hebrew prophets, and not the author of the Gospel. Many traditional readers still hold that the apostle wrote both.

When was it written?

Irenaeus says John saw the vision near the end of the reign of Domitian (Against Heresies 5.30.3), emperor from AD 81 to 96. That gives the usual date, about AD 95, and it fits the book’s world: an emperor who liked to be hailed as dominus et deus noster, our lord and god (Suetonius, Domitian 13); a new temple to the emperors at Ephesus; and Rome called Babylon, a code name Jews and Christians used after Rome burned the Temple in AD 70. A minority of scholars prefer AD 68 or 69, just after Nero, reading the “seven kings” of Revelation 17:10 as a list of emperors. The riddle of Nero’s number is in What does 666 mean?

Revelation, not Revelations

The book’s first words give its title: “This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1). The Greek word is apokalypsis, an unveiling, a curtain pulled back. That is where apocalypse comes from; its sense of catastrophe came much later. It is one revelation, so the title is singular. “Revelations” is a common slip, perhaps because the book holds so many visions. The King James Bible titles it “The Revelation of St. John the Divine,” where divine means theologian. In the Greek East he is John the Theologian, and the eleventh-century monastery above his cave on Patmos still bears that name.