The Writing Process
There are many works that point out that John did not know Greek. His grammar sucked is merely a polite way of covering up how bad it really is. This is not the road I will take in my argument, but rather the literary and mechanical process that it was produced. To understand this we need to look into how John created content. Almost everyone agrees that Revelation has the most allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures and there are works that show how Revelation uses Zechariah ( Marko Jauhiainen, The Use of Zechariah in Revelation, Mohr Sidbeck, 2005) and how Revelation uses Isaiah (Jan Fekkes, Isaiah and Prophetic Traditions in the book of Revelations). Those works are merely looking for the commonality between Revelation and its source.
The way, I look at the formation of Revelation is different, I don’t see it as a finish product, but a process. How Revelation incorporates the Hebrew Scriptures is via a process and determining the process is essential to understanding the work and whether one or more authors were involved.
The process that John wrote Revelation is the same process in which the vast majority of the Hebrew Scriptures, and most of the Christian Scriptures, were written in. The process is known as Hebrew Poetry, which in essence is comprise of making two lists that have some kind of logical agreement with each other. The two lists can follow the same order (called in this post, a simple parallel) or one list can be in the reverse order (called in this post, an inverted parallel or a chiasmus). The individual items in the list can be complementary to each other or they can be opposite to each other. The fundamental advantage to Hebrew Poetry, is once you have one story, by making a few tweaks you have a second story. For example, the book of Ezekiel is a simple parallel to the latter half of the book of Exodus.
Exodus 19:1 - 40:38 | Ezekiel (1:1 - 48:35) (Ordered by) |
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Ezekiel eats the two sided scroll which tastes like honey (2:8 - 3:3). |
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*Exodus passages aligned to Ezekiel passages.
The author of Ezekiel, or Exodus, depending upon your perspective, simply took the text of one story and tweaked it to make the next story. This is not a practice that is confined to Exodus and Ezekiel, but it is how most of the Hebrew Scriptures were written and most of the Christian Scriptures (the Gospels, Luke-Acts, and some Pauline works) were also written this way. It also shows us, that Moses may not have much of an existence after the Pentateuch, but he is there, just conveyed in different Hebrew heroes.
The First Draft, The Ezekiel-Isaiah Draft (EID)
The author of Revelation, like the author of Ezekiel, creates the vast majority of his content from the whole of Ezekiel and Isaiah chapters 6 to 29. The process, first involved identifying the parallel between the Ezekiel and Isaiah passages and then putting it into a form that would allow for more parallel formation. You can see the process and the text that formed the first draft of Revelation here https://drive.google.com/file/d/12JZcor ... sp=sharing . I have arrange content found in Revelation that maps to the content of Ezekiel and Isaiah in the order of Ezekiel and Isaiah which represents what the first draft must have looked like. If you print it out in double sided format, and bind it, I had made it so that the Ezekiel content would be on the left page and the Isaiah content would be on the right side. This is important for further exploration.
There are many things were mentioning about the first draft, but here are the key points that affect this topic.
- The selection of Ezekiel, was due in part to the similarity between the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and by the Romans.
- The author was well aware of the parallel between Ezekiel and Isiah 6 – 29.
- The vast majority of the content selection from Isaiah was to depict Jesus.
The next formation, John did was to produce a chiasmus with the content of the Ezekiel-Isaiah draft (EID) and Zechariah 1:1 to 12:10. John adjusted the order of the EID to conform to the reverse order of the Zechariah passage with the entry point of a passage used by Christians at the time:
I will pour on David’s house . . and they will look to me whom they have pierced (Zech 12:10).
The process of shifting the text of the EID to the Zechariah Draft (ZrD) can be seen in the first two pages of this document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AUjJo ... zv_Dp/view. The result of the process rearranges the text of Ezekiel in line with the text of Revelation today. The process, answers one of the great questions of Revelation, in that why does the order of Ezekiel, or how come the order of Ezekiel, differ from the order in Revelation. This is not proof, but it is evidence. Perhaps, what is more telling is how Revelation uses Zechariah chapters 2 to 4 into the 42, 1260 day, 3 ½ day parallel (see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WpWPI ... sqTHo/view).
Do we see this type of writing, where a book is formed in opposite order of another book in the Hebrew Scriptures, yes we do. Genesis-Exodus is the text book example of two books forming a Chiasmus. So this is not a process that is out of the ordinary or a process that was invented by the author of Revelation.
The Third Draft, the Deuteronomy-Joshua Draft (DJD).
So far, we have a simple parallel, to form the first draft, and a chiasmus to form the second draft. So how was the third draft created? Just as a chiasmus, in the ZrD, is the opposite of a simple parallel in the EID, John next draft would be the opposite of the ZrD.
John took the last six chapters of Deuteronomy and the first six chapters of Joshua and inserted the material backwards into the Zechariah Draft. At one point in the process he stops and then goes forward. I have theorized that it was to fill up the blank space in the initial DJD process (see [url https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-CVjXj ... sp=sharing[/url]).
The selection of the Deuteronomy-Joshua material was to show a transition from Moses to Joshua / Jesus. All activities that Joshua did in the material, Jesus also did. This is where we also get the synonym of Lamb for the name of Jesus.
The Fourth Draft, the Exodus-Draft (ExD)
With all the major parallel formation tactics exhausted, John took the book of Exodus and used it to overlay a theological theme. This is similar to the Gospel of Matthew overlaying the life of Moses onto the life of Jesus. Pharaoh tried to kill Moses when he was an infant, Herod tried to kill Jesus when he was an infant. Moses gave us the law, Jesus was to fulfill the law. Moses wrote five books, Jesus gave five great talks. Where as in Revelation, God gives us his new name just like he gave Moses in Exodus 3:14 (Rev 1:9). Much of Exodus has to do with the creation of the tabernacle, and so much of Revelation has to do with Jesus servicing the tabernacle (see page 10 in https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QLNLg ... sp=sharing).
The Fifth Draft, the Daniel Draft (DnD)
The Daniel draft was to interject missing content into Revelation. Such as but not limited to:
- The Beast, as an adversary to Jesus (see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t96Ph ... sp=sharing).
- The whole thing is coming down soon see ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gfQzJ ... p=sharing , https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_KydT ... sp=sharing, and https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ujEKU ... p=sharing ).
- Some of the descriptions of Jesus found in Revelation 1 to 3, 19.
Once finish the book there was lots of internal parallels done by the author, such as but not limited to:
- The first three churches and the description of the beast in Revelation 13 forming a chiasmus and intentionally using synonyms (see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gGkg- ... sp=sharing).
- The seven trumpets and seven bowls (see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kSQlm ... p=sharing )
There is nothing in the mechanical process in the development of Revelation that differs. All passages found within Revelation, differing, or separated content, can be explained by this process. Furthermore, the process that was used to write Revelation is no different in the process in writing the myriad of books that proceeded it. All differences, separated content, conflicting content can be understood in the writing of Revelation as depicted in this short overview.
The selection of the passages that early Christians would have used as the proof texts for Jesus, in every stage of the process. Illustrates that the author intended from the very beginning as a Christian document. The process itself morphed the text, shifted the text, to what we have now. It is possible, that the author did not know how the book would end.
As Robert M. Price said about my work:
The illustrations provided in this post, is a subset of what I cover in my book, How John Wrote the Book of Revelation.What Kim has done is to distinguish broken patterns in the text. That is, he zeroes in on all the allusions/quotations from any single Old Testament source text and is able to show how these verses look as if they were used by the author to create, e.g., a chiasm, a ABC-C’B’A’ pattern, an initial sequence of words and ideas counting down, then counting back up again. (This is a common stylistic device in the New Testament.) But it only works in Revelation once you isolate the relevant verses. And the fact that it does work implies it is no coincidence, and that the intervening material must have been a subsequent addition by the same author, expanding his book. He was willing to sacrifice his original structural flourishes to accommodate new Old Testament material appropriate to the context. This material, too, may have been laid out in new patterns. In a still subsequent stage of revision, the author will have again felt free to obscure his previous structures in favor of the intended content.