This should be a quick little section to discuss but it's important for a variety of reasons. First, it's important to understand that scholarship is virtually (I use the word "virtually" because while I can't find a single scholar who disagrees I am sure there is one
somewhere) united that it was originally written in Greek. This is important because it means something very significant. It means that it was written to appeal to a Greek speaking audience...in other words a gentile audience. It was not written to appeal to Jewish converts or else it would have been written in Aramaic. This makes sense as the letter is addressed to the seven churches in Asia-Minor that were largely gentile churches. So it's written to appeal to that audience and that's something to keep in mind as we go through the text, because it will imply cultural traditions of the times that I will identify later. For now just file that in the back of your mind but always keep that target audience in mind when we start making interpretations. That creates context and that is very important in determining what John of Patmos was talking about..
Now the Apocalypse is difficult enough to understand with all of its picture images, and seemingly vague suggestions, and bold predictions. But translators have historically struggled with the Apocalypse because...well....John of Patmos didn't make it very easy on them. His writing style fluctuates between sometimes very poetic Greek and Greek that is so strange in its composition that it becomes extremely difficult to translate.
For example Revelation 1:4 is usually translated as: "
To the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come..."
(1)...or something very similar to that depending on which version you are reading.
But in Greek it's quite different. It reads "
Grace and peace to you from HE THE is, HE THE was, and HE THE will be...." Sigh...wow! That's really off the wall. The first thing people might think is that maybe the speakers of ancient Greek did not conjugate as we do in English. In other words they would use the exact same word for "he" and "him" or "the" and "that". But in fact that's not true at all. In ancient Greek "the" was written "ο" and "that" was written "ότι". "He" was written "Αυτός" and "him" was written "αυτόν". So it wasn't that Greek speaking people didn't distinguish between "he" and "him" or "the" and "that".
It's that John didn't....at least not there.
In other places he does which adds to the mystery of his writing. The manner in which John writes Revelation 1:4 would have sounded just as odd to natural speakers of Greek in the first century as it does to us today in English.
There are a lot of theories about why John does this and to be truthful I have not yet made up my own mind completely although I lean toward one. One theory is that John is writing in "broken Greek". This is a favorite theory among those who claim John the Apostle wrote the Apocalypse. The argument goes like this: "John the Apostle, a native speaker of Aramaic, and a novice speaker of Greek wrote the best he could but he didn't know enough of the Greek language to do things like conjugate properly. Much like a German tourist in the United States might say '
I want to a movie to go" instead of "
I want to go to a movie", because in German the active verb is always placed at the end, John's broken Greek is the result of a native Aramaic speaker trying to write in a foreign language and confusing the sentence structure and tenses of the words."
Well...but then why would he write in very normal Greek in other sections and almost poetic Greek in others? If he was writing broken Greek because he didn't know any better, wouldn't he do so through the entire letter? Advocates of the "broken Greek" theory respond to that by saying "well in reality it took John a long time to write the book and in the beginning his Greek was terrible and by the end he had gotten better at it." Well...again an interesting argument that would make sense if John's Greek started out bad and progressively got better until the end. But that's not what happens. John starts off in this crazy form of Greek, then goes into this flowing beautiful Greek, then goes back into this really off the wall Greek, then back to normal Greek....it's all over the place. Normally I tell people to read the Bible in the original languages the best they can even if it requires some help from outside sources to do so...in truth I am not sure I want to curse anyone by suggesting they try to read The Apocalypse in Greek. It's confusing enough in English let alone in the mind-numbing, back and forth styles of Greek in which John writes .
Another theory is that multiple people wrote The Apocalypse and
that would explain the differences in the styles of Greek being used. One writer was an expert in Greek, one was a typical Greek writer, and one was a terrible writer. Well there's nothing to suggest that The Apocalypse was the work of a group of people. If that was the case then why was John the only identified author? Wouldn't all of them be credited with the writing much like in the letters of Paul where he attributes the writing to himself, Timothy, et al? I find this argument implausible because if you accept it then you must essentially concede that the entire work is a bunch of BS. John is relating visions he has seen and he writes in the first person and presents it as a spiritual experience he has had. if multiple people wrote it then you have to argue as well that multiple people also saw those same visions and had the same spiritual experience. Well that doesn't seem very realistic to me. Regardless it's a theory that is out there. It's not one I embrace nor is it a theory that has gained much support in scholarly circles.
Some argue that John, being illiterate, used scribes but since he didn't dictate it all in one day multiple scribes were used; one of which was an expert scribe, one of which was average, and one of which was terrible.
That would account for the differences in writing style. But again that creates problems. Where would a guy who was banished to Patmos...essentially a criminal in the eyes of Rome...get the money to hire a scribe? As I alluded to in an earlier post, banishment to an island for superstition was probably not the harsh conditions that is traditionally painted, but neither was it exactly the lap of luxury. All outside sources of revenue were cut off from the person in exile. They had to make do with what they earned on the island. It's pretty tough for me to buy the argument that John, a man in exile, cut off from any outside financial support would have had excess money to pay scribes. You can champion the theory if you want but it sounds like bullshit to me. Again, it's a theory that's out there but again one I don't endorse and one that scholarship generally rejects.
The theory I lean towards is the one which argues that John was writing that way on purpose. It wasn't "unintentional broken Greek" so much as it was "intentional, guttural Greek slang" so to speak. Take the point I made above about Revelation 1:4 with the "he the be, he the was" form of writing. The argument states that John was writing in a slang form as a show of rebelliousness and to appeal to an audience that was certainly a culture that was set apart from standard Roman culture at the time. Think of it in modern terms. Instead of someone saying today "
I want to give you my opinion on this" they might say "
Lemme tell ya how it be". It's a slangy, guttural, rebellious form of speaking that is set apart from what would be considered "proper" according to the current culture. John's message was certainly rebellious. There is no denying that. It was certainly provocative. It makes sense that he would write a provocative message in a provocative manner of speech. Almost as if to say to his listeners (who were themselves certainly rebellious...at least against the norms of Rome at the time), "see how I am talking? I am one of you. I gotcho back."
It's an interesting theory. Again I have not completely made up my mind why the style of Greek bounces back and forth like it does. But this last one
I think is the most plausible among the others that have been advanced. If you put a gun to my head and said "give us the reason why the Greek in The Apocalypse is so messed up and back and forth" I would consider myself a dead man because although the "intentional slang theory" seems to me to be the most plausible I am not terribly confident in it. In short,
I don't know why it's like that. From what I can tell scholarship has not formed a consensus on the issue and so they don't know either.
One last point I would like to make is that the style of Greek John used has been a nightmare for translators because it puts them in a choice between two evils. If they translate it word for word, then modern readers get a text that becomes almost impossible to understand in certain places...sometimes very critical places. If they translate it according to what they
think John meant then they run the risk of allowing their own biases to corrupt the text. It's a shitty position to be in and I have to give a lot of sympathy to translators of The Apocalypse, because John sure as hell didn't make their lives any easier.
So there it is. This is a great topic for discussion because as there is no scholarly consensus, and because I am not willing to take a very firm stance on the issue, there is some opportunity for some good exchanges of ideas on all sides.
