Dating Revelation again

Hengstenberg claims in his massive commentary on Revelation that that “all antiquity agrees in the opinion of Domitian’s being the author of John’s banishment” (he’s quoting another scholar but approving the conclusion).

What is the evidence? Irenaeus, of course. Clement of Alexandria is quoted as saying that “John after the death of the tyrant returned to Ephesus from the isle of Patmos.” There’s no name, but, says Hengstenberg, Clement speaks as if citing a well-known tradition and besides Domitian “pre-eminently deserves” the name “tyrant.”

Origen also fails to mention Domitian in his comment that “the king of the Romans, as tradition testifies, condemned the witnessing John on account of the word of truth to the isle Patmos.” Hengstenberg acknowledges that “Origen is silent respecting the name” but explains that it was “generally known, and the blank was easily supplied from the tradition.”

Eusebius does name Domitian, but then he explicitly cites Irenaeus as his source, so Eusebius hardly adds anything to Irenaeus. Hengstenberg says that Eusebius includes more information than Irenaeus, and thus it’s evident that Irenaeus was not the “only source of the tradition.” He in fact “refers to several depositaries of the tradition.” That is so, but none of these are named.

Finally, Hengstenberg notes Victorinus of Petabio, martyred under Diocletian, whose writing on the Apocalypse takes a domitianic date “as a matter of undoubted certainty.”

He concludes: “These are all the testimonies on the time of the composition of the Apocalypse belonging to the age of living tradition. They declare with perfect unanimity that John was banihed by Domitian to Patmos, and there wrote the Apocalypse.

What do we actually have? The testimony of Irenaeus (itself ambiguous), two anonymous references, Eusebius (whose only explicit source is Irenaeus), and Victorinus. That constitutes a “unanimous” tradition?

In fact, Hengstenberg knows that alternative dates were offered by earlier writers, but he discredits their testimony. All of the “deviant” writers are “writers of inferior rank” – people like Epiphanius, who is not only second-class but “extremely credulous.” The “deviators” vary among themselves – some place the book in the age of Nero, others in the time of Claudius, and another writer says that John was banished by Trajan. Behind all these proposals he sees the same motivation that impels modern critics to give the book an early date – the conclusion that the book is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and therefore must be dated prior to that event.

The sleight of hand here is remarkable. Hengstenberg constructs a fragile “tradition” from unreliable materials. That tradition becomes the standard, and anyone who says otherwise is “deviant.” That saves his from having to say that the “tradition” itself was variable, which it self-evidently was (unless one arbitrarily draws a line between the “reliable” and “inferior” witnesses).

Hengstenberg’s style of argument certainly cannot stand up to contemporary patristic scholarship, which revels in the diversity and variety of patristic opinion, and resolutely opposes any notion of a fixed norm. That contemporary stance also has its problems, but at least it opens an opportunity for a renewed challenge to the weak “unanimous tradition” on which too many scholars still rely.