one may well call this book
a _grand anthology_ of the old Hebrew poets. But the poetic
diction of one and the same writer may differ widely from his
prose style, as we see in the case of Moses, Isaiah, and
Jeremiah.

If the above considerations do not wholly remove the difficulty
under consideration they greatly relieve it. The apostolic
authorship of the fourth gospel and the first epistle of John is
sustained by a mass of evidence that cannot be set aside. That
the same John also wrote the visions of the Apocalypse is
attested, as we have seen, by the almost unanimous voice of
antiquity. Far greater difficulties are involved in the denial
of the ancient tradition of the church than in the admission of
it.

3. The _date_ of the Apocalypse has been a matter of much discussion,
the great question being whether it was written before or after the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The external testimony strongly
preponderates on the side of a late date; for the great body of this
tradition represents the banishment of the apostle to the isle of Patmos
as having taken place under Domitian who succeeded Titus, and reigned
from A.D. 81 to 96. This supposition also agrees with the fact that the
recipients of our Lord's seven messages (chaps. 2, 3) are the seven
churches of Proconsular Asia, among whom, according to the unanimous
testimony of the primitive church, the apostle spent the latter years of
his life. The hypothesis of an earlier date is but feebly supported by
external testimony. It rests mainly on the alleged reference of the
writer to the overthrow of Jerusalem as an event yet future, and as
being the main subject of the prophesies contained in the book. But this
reference has never been clearly established, and is contradicted by the
general analogy of prophecy, by the contents of the book, and by its
manifest relation to the prophecies of Daniel. A few only of the briefer
prophetic books, as those of Jonah and Nahum, confine themselves to one
particular event lying in the near future. All the more extended among
them, and many of the shorter, look forward undeniably to the distant
future. The book of Daniel can be interpreted only as containing a great
scheme of prophecy stretching forward into the distant future, and with
this the revelation of John has the closest connection. The _place_
where the revelation was received was the isle of Patmos, one of