Episode of the Two Witnesses in the Book of Revelation

Below is the 20th of multiple excerpts of commentary on the Book of Revelation from The Parousia, the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell: 

"Episode of the Two Witnesses 

"CHAP. xi. 3-13 [Rev. 11:3-13].-‘And I will give (power) unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. ... 

"We now enter upon the investigation of one of the most difficult problems contained in Scripture, and one which has exercised, we may even say baffled, the research and ingenuity of critics and commentators up to the present hour. Who are the two witnesses? Are they mythical or historical persons? Are they symbols or actual realities? ...
"It is one of the tests of a true theory of interpretation that it should be a good working hypothesis. When the right key to the Apocalypse [Book of Revelation] is found it will open every lock. If this prophetic vision [Revelation] be, as we believe it to be, the reproduction and expansion of the prophecy on the Mount of Olives [as recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21]; and if we are to look for the dramatis personae who appear in its scenes within the [generational] limits of the period to which that prophecy extends [as specified in Rev. 1:7, Matt. 10:23, 16:28, 24:34, 26:64; Mark 9:1, 13:30, 14:62; Luke 9:27, 21:32, 22:69], then the area of investigation becomes very restricted, and the probabilities of discovery proportionately increased. In the inquiry respecting the identity of the two witnesses we are shut up almost to a [narrow] point of time. Some of the data are precise enough. It will be seen that the period of their prophesying [that of the two witnessses] is antecedent to the sounding of the seventh trumpet, that is, just previous to the catastrophe of Jerusalem. The scene of their prophesying also is not obscurely indicated [in Rev. 11:8]: it is ‘the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified' [i.e., Jerusalem]. ...The question then is, What two persons living in the last days of the Jewish commonwealth and in the city of Jerusalem, can be found to answer the description of the two witnesses as given in the vision? That description is so marked and minute that their identification ought not to be difficult. There are seven leading characteristics:--- 

1. They are witnesses of Christ [note "my " witnesses, Revelation 11:3]

2. They are two in number. 

3. They are endowed with miraculous powers. 

4. They are symbolically represented by the two olive trees and two candlesticks seen in the vision of Zechariah. (Zech. iv. [4])

5. They prophesy in sackcloth, i.e. their message is one of woe.

6. They die a violent death in the city, and their dead bodies are treated with ignominy. 

7. After three days and a half they rise from the dead, and are taken up to heaven

"...[W]e now proceed to search for the two witnesses of Christ who testified for their Lord and sealed their testimony with their blood, in Jerusalem, in the last days of the Jewish polity [government], and we have no hesitation in naming St. James and St. Peter as the persons indicated. 

"1. St. James

"We know as a matter of fact and of history that in the last days of Jerusalem there lived in that city a Christian teacher eminent for his sanctity, a faithful witness of Christ, endowed with the gifts of prophecy and miracles, who [in effect] prophesied in sackcloth, and who sealed his testimony with his blood, being murdered in the streets of Jerusalem towards the closing days of the Jewish commonwealth. This was ‘James, a servant of God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ' [James 1:1].

"Let us see how this name fulfills the requirements of the problem. It is impossible to conceive a more adequate representation of the old prophets and the law of Moses than the Apostle James. That he was a faithful witness of Christ in Jerusalem is unquestionable. His habitual, if not his fixed, residence was there: his relation to the church of Jerusalem makes this all but certain. No man of that day had a better title to be called an Elijah. ...[James's] primitive sanctity won for him even in that wicked city the appellation of the Just [as recorded by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus]: was not this the manner of man to ‘torment them that dwelt in the land,’ and to answer to the description of a witness of Christ? We can still hear the echo of those stern rebukes which galled the proud and covetous men who ‘oppressed the hireling in his wages, [Malachi 3:5]’ and which predicted the swiftly-coming wrath which was now so near,---‘Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming on. Ye heaped up treasures in the last days' [James 5:3].’ Who can with greater probability be named as one of the two prophet witnesses of the last days than James of Jerusalem, ‘the Lord’s brother'? [Galatians 1:19]

"Concerning the exact time and manner of the martyrdom of this witness there may be some doubt, but of the fact itself, and of its having taken place in the city of Jerusalem, there can be none. Thus far, at all events, St. James, in the manner of his life and of his death, answers with remarkable fitness to the description of the witnesses given in the Apocalypse [Revelation]. ...

 "2. St. Peter.

"But who is the other witness? ...Undoubtedly the second witness, like the first, must be sought among the apostles. They were pre-eminently Christ’s witnesses, and possessed in the highest degree the miraculous endowments ascribed to the witnesses in the Apocalypse. Now, what other apostle besides St. James had a recognised connection with the church of Jerusalem; dwelt statedly in that city; lived up to the eve of the dissolution of the Jewish polity; died a martyr’s death; and suffered in Jerusalem? ...If it should appear that the habitual or fixed residence of St. Peter was in Jerusalem [as noted in the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostle Paul in Galatians, and even by Peter himself in 1 Peter 4:13, where Jerusalem is cryptically referred to as "Babylon," as Russell explains later], that there was an intimate, if not an official, connection between him and the church of that city; and that St. Peter was in Jerusalem on the eve of the Jewish revolt: all these circumstances would lend great probability to the supposition that St. Peter was the other witness associated with St. James.

"...That St. Peter’s stated abode was in Jerusalem is, we think, proved. That he lived up to the verge of the Jewish revolt and war is evident from his epistles. That he died a martyr’s death we know from our Lord’s prediction [John 21:18-19]; and in his case we may well say that the proverb would hold good, ‘It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem [Luke 13:33].’ As we read his epistles, and view them as the testimony of one of the two apostolic witnesses of Christ in the doomed city, a new emphasis is imparted to his mysterious utterance which anticipates his own and his country’s fate, ‘The time is come when judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at [with] us! [what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?]’ [1 Peter 4:17]. How appalling the description of the evil times and evil men, as he saw them in the last days, with his own eyes, in Jerusalem! While the last chapter might be the final testimony of the prophet-witness to the guilty land and city; the last warning-cry before the fiery storm of vengeance burst: ‘The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night,’ etc. (2 Pet. iii. 10 [2 Pet. 3:10]).

"Let us now see how far the requirements of the apocalyptic description are met by this identification of the two witnesses as St. James and St. Peter.

"They are two in number.... They are more than this,- --they are fellow-servants and brethren in Christ, associated in the same work, the same church, the same city. ...What the old prophets were to Israel, St. James and St. Peter were to their own generation, and especially to Jerusalem, the chief scene of their life and labours. The period of their [the two witnesses'] prophecy is also remarkable; it is for the space of a thousand two hundred and threescore days, or three years and a half [Rev. 11:3], representing the duration of the Jewish[-Roman] war [that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70]. They prophe[s]y in sackcloth: that is, their message is of coming judgment; the denunciation of the wrath of God. ...They are endowed with miraculous powers, a characteristic which must not be explained away, and which will apply only to apostolic witnesses. They are to seal their testimony with their blood, and thus far we find St. James and St. Peter perfectly fulfil the conditions of the problem. We are sure that they were both martyrs of Christ, and that too in the last days of the Jewish commonwealth. As regards the place where St. James’s blood was shed we have credible historical evidence [from the 1st-century historian Josephus] that it was in Jerusalem. ...Of the death of St. Peter we possess no [solid historical] record; but the very silence is suggestive. That the two chief persons in the church of Jerusalem should fall victims to a suspicious government, or to popular fury, at the moment when revolution was on the point of breaking out, or had already broken out, is only too probable; that their dead bodies should lie unburied is in accordance with what actually occurred in many instances during that fearful period of lawless barbarity which preceded the fall of Jerusalem [in A.D. 70]."



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