one of his favorite modes of punishment.^595 Both facts give support to this tradition. After a promising
beginning he became as cruel and bloodthirsty as Nero, and surpassed him in hypocrisy and
blasphemous self-deification. He began his letters: "Our Lord and God commands," and required
his subjects to address him so.^596 He ordered gold and silver statues of himself to be placed in the
holiest place of the temples. When he seemed most friendly, he was most dangerous. He spared
neither senators nor consuls when they fell under his dark suspicion, or stood in the way of his
ambition. He searched for the descendants of David and the kinsmen of Jesus, fearing their
aspirations, but found that they were poor and innocent persons.^597 Many Christians suffered
martyrdom under his reign, on the charge of atheism—among them his own cousin, Flavius Clemens,
of consular dignity, who was put to death, and his wife Domitilla, who was banished to the island
of Pandateria, near Naples.^598 In favor of the traditional date may also be urged an intrinsic propriety
that the book which closes the canon, and treats of the last things till the final consummation, should
have been written last.
Nevertheless, the internal evidence of the Apocalypse itself, and a comparison with the
fourth Gospel, favor an earlier date, before the destruction of Jerusalem, and during the interregnum
which followed the death of Nero (68), when the beast, that is the Roman empire, was wounded,
but was soon to be revived (by the accession of Vespasian). If there is some foundation for the
early tradition of the intended oil-martyrdom of John at Rome, or at Ephesus, it would naturally
point to the Neronian persecution, in which Christians were covered with inflammable material
and burned as torches. The unmistakable allusions to imperial persecutions apply much better to
Nero than to Domitian. The difference between the Hebrew coloring and fiery vigor of the
Apocalypse and the pure Greek and calm repose of the fourth Gospel, to which we have already
alluded, are more easily explained if the former was written some twenty years earlier. This view
has some slight support in ancient tradition,^599 and has been adopted by the majority of modern
critical historians and commentators.^600
We hold, then, as the most probable view, that John was exiled to Patmos under Nero, wrote
the Apocalypse soon after Nero’s death, a.d. 68 or 69, returned to Ephesus, completed his Gospel
and Epistles several (perhaps twenty) years later, and fell asleep in peace during the year of Trajan,
after a.d. 98.(^595) Tacitus congratulates Agricola (Vita Agr., c. 44) that he did not live to see under this emperor "tot consularium caedes, tot
nobilissimarum feminarum exilia et fugas." Agricola, whose daughter Tacitus married, died in 93, two years before Domitian.
(^596) Suetonius, Domit., c. 13: "Dominus et Deus noster hoc fieri jubet. Unde institutum posthac, ut ne scripto quidem ac sermone
cujusquam appellaretur aliter."
(^597) Hegesippus in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., III., 19, 20. Hegesippus, however, is silent about the banishment of John, and this
silence has been used by Bleek as an argument against the fact.
(^598) Dion Cassius in the abridgment of Xiphilinus, 67, 14.
(^599) So the title of the Syriac translation of the Apocalypse (which, however, is of much later date than the Peshitto, which omits
the Apocalypse): "Revelatio quam Deus Joanni Evangelistae in Patmo insula dedit, in quam a Nerone Caesare relegatus
fuerat."Clement of Alexandria (Quis dives salv., c. 42, and quoted by Eusebius, III., 23) says indefinitely that John returned
from Patmos to Ephesus after the death of "the tyrant" (τοῦ τυράννου τελευτήσαντος), which may apply to Nero as well as to
Domitian. Origen mentions simply a Roman βασιλεύς. Tertullian’s legend of the Roman oil-martyrdom of John seems to point
to Nero rather than to any other emperor, and was so understood by Jerome (Adv. Jovin. I. 26), although Tertullian does not say
so, and Jerome himself assigns the exile and the composition of the Apocalypse to the reign of Domitian (De vir. ill., c. 9).
Epiphanius (Haer. LI. 33) puts the banishment back to the reign of Claudius (a.d. 41-53), which is evidently much too early.
(^600) Neander, Gieseler, Baur, Ewald, Lücke, Bleek, De Wette, Reuss, Düsterdieck, Weiss, Renan, Stanley, Lightfoot, Westcott.
A.D. 1-100.