JERUSALEM; ROME; REVELATION - The Preterist Archive

(meaning Asia Minor). Among such “great lights,” Polycrates includes also “John - who was
both a witness and a teacher; who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord”; and who “also sleeps
at Ephesus” in “death.” 115
289. The 380 A.D. Jerome records that “John is an Apostle and an Evangelist and a
Prophet.... He saw in the island of Patmos, to which he had been banished by the Emperor
Domitian as a martyr for the Lord, an Apocalypse containing the boundless mysteries to the
future” 116 - and not to the past or the present, as alleged by modern Preterists. “Domitian
having raised a second persecution, he [John] was banished to the island of Patmos.” There,
John had received the vision.
290. Later, however, “Domitian was put to death, and his acts (on account of his
excessive cruelty) were annulled by the Senate.” As a result, John “returned to Ephesus under
Pertinax” (alias Emperor Nerva Pertinax). John then “continued there, until the time of the
Emperor Trajan; he founded and built churches throughout all Asia [Minor]; and, worn out by
old age, died in the sixty-eighth year after our Lord’s passion” (or around 102 A.D.), “and was
buried near the same city” (of Ephesus). 117
291. We conclude, then, that not just the internal but also the external evidence of the
Early Christian Church points to the likelihood of the last book of the Bible being written and
the canon being closed before A.D. 70 - some three decades before the death of its writer the
Apostle John at a very old age. The last few verses of Revelation 22:16-21 confirm this. So
too does the internal evidence of almost all other books of the New Testament sometimes
misaccorded a late date (see our sections 184 to 188 above). And so too does the scanty
extant but Pre-Irenaean patristic evidence - such as that of the A.D. 165 Melito of Sardis and
the 170 A.D. Muratorian Canon.
* * * * * * *
292. Now although some of the events predicted in John’s Revelation (1:1 f)
commenced occurring at the time John was writing (cf. Revelation chapters 2 to 3), it would
still be many centuries before all the events predicted would finish occurring (cf. Deuteronomy
32:35 & Malachi 3:1 & 4:1-6 & Psalm 90:1-4). After all, key parts of the book of
Revelation are based largely on the book of Daniel. And most of the predictions in Daniel
were not preteristically fulfilled in his own lifetime (B.C. 606 to 535), but would only start
being fulfilled historicalistically many centuries later (e.g. Daniel 2:44 and 7:7-25 and 9:24-
27 and 12:1-13).
293. Hengstenberg says in his 1851 book The Revelation (I:34): “The Second Coming
of Christ and the Resurrection [of the dead] were at a great distance from the present time
[when John wrote it]. In the middle, lay a period of a ‘thousand years’ [Revelation 20:1-7].”
Yet during the time between the past commencement and the still-future termination of those
events referred to in the Book of Revelation -- they would also continue to occur.
294. Thus Hengstenberg (I:80f.) writes even about the verse Revelation 1:7 that “the
Lord does not merely once come with the clouds [only] at the end of the World, but [He
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