The pre-A.D. 70 Date of Revelation's Composition

Below is the third 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:

"DATE OF THE APOCALYPSE [BOOK OF REVELATION].

"If the foregoing conclusions [about the speedy coming of the Lord] are well founded, they virtually decide the much-debated questions respecting the date of the Apocalypse [Revelation]. Perhaps it may be admitted that the weight of authority [i.e., tradition], such as it is, inclines to the side of the late date: that is, that it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem [i.e., after A.D. 70]; but the internal evidence seems to us overwhelming on the side of its early date [i.e., before A.D. 70]. That the Apocalypse contemplates the Parousia [Second Coming] as imminent is surely an incontrovertible proposition. That the Parousia is always represented as coincident with the judgment of the guilty city [1st-century Jerusalem] and nation [1st-century Israel] is no less undeniable. Those who cannot find the Parousia, the destruction of Jerusalem, the judgment of Israel, and the end of the [Old Covenant] age [Greek: sunteleia tou aionos] in the Apocalypse, as in all the rest of the New Testament, and find them also as impending events, must be blind indeed. What other tremendous crisis was approaching at that period to which the Apocalypse could refer? Or what event could be more worthy to be described in the sublime and awful imagery of the Apocalypse than the final catastrophe of the Jewish dispensation [Old Covenant age], and the unparalleled woes by which it was accompanied?

"1. That the Apocalypse was written before the [A.D. 70] destruction of Jerusalem will follow as a matter of course if it can be shown that that event forms in great measure the subject of its predictions. This, we believe, can be done so as to satisfy any reasonable mind. We appeal to [Revelation] chap. i. 7 [Rev. 1:7]: ‘Behold he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and [even] they also which pierced him: and all the tribes of the land [Greek: hai phulai tes ges] shall wail because of him.’ ‘The tribes of the land’ can only mean the people of Israel, as is proved by the original prophecy in Zech. xii. 10-14 [Zech. 12:10-14], and still more by the language of our Saviour in Matt. xxiv. 30 [Matt. 24:30]. There cannot be the shadow of a doubt that the ‘coming’ referred to is the Parousia, the precursor of judgment, terrible to those ‘who pierced him,’ and always declared by our Lord to lie within the limits of the existing [1st-century] generation."

[In the next excerpt, Russell continues his enumeration of the internal evidence that the Book of Revelation was written before A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by the Romans. On the subject of Revelation's date, see Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament by Jonathan Bernier (2022), Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr. (1989), and Redating the New Testament by John A.T. Robinson (1976).]

 

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