The difference in style between the Revelation and the gospel of John is due to the fact that the Revelation was written during John's exile in Patmos, under Nero, in 67 or 68, soon after John had left Palestine and had taken up his residence at Ephesus. He had hitherto spoken Aramæan, and Greek was comparatively unfamiliar to him. The gospel was written thirty years after, probably about 97, when Greek had become to him like a mother tongue. See Lightfoot on Galatians, 343, 347; per contra, see Milligan, Revelation of St. John. Phrases and ideas which indicate a common authorship of the Revelation and the gospel are the following: “the Lamb of God,” “the Word of God,” “the True”as an epithet applied to Christ, “the Jews” as enemies of God, “manna,” “him whom they pierced”; see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:4, 5. In the fourth gospel we have ἀμνός, in Apoc. ἀρνίον, perhaps better to distinguish “the Lamb” from the diminutive τὸ θηρίον, “the beast.” Common to both Gospel and Rev. are ποιεῖν, “to do” [the truth]; περιπατεῖν, of moral conduct; ἀληθινός, “genuine”; διψᾷν, πεινᾷν, of the higher wants of the soul; σκηνοῦν ἐν, ποιμαίνειν, ὁδηγεῖν; also “overcome,” “testimony,” “Bridegroom,” “Shepherd,” “Water of life.” In the Revelation there are grammatical solecisms: nominative for genitive, 1:4—ἀπὸ ὁ ὤν; nominative for accusative, 7:9—εἶδον ... ὄχλος πολύς; accusative for nominative, 20:2—τὸν δράκοντα ὁ ὄφις. Similarly we have in Rom. 12:5—τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ εἶς instead of τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ ἕνα, where κατὰ has lost its regimen—a frequent solecism in later Greek writers; see Godet on John, 1:269, 270. Emerson reminded Jones Very that the Holy Ghost surely writes good grammar. The Apocalypse seems to show that Emerson was wrong.
The author of the fourth gospel speaks of John in the third person, “and scorned to blot it with a name.” But so does Cæsar speak of himself in his Commentaries. Harnack [pg 152]regards both the fourth gospel and the Revelation as the work of John the Presbyter or Elder, the former written not later than about 110 A. D.; the latter from 93 to 96, but being a revision of one or more underlying Jewish apocalypses. Vischer has expounded this view of the Revelation; and Porter holds substantially the same, in his article on the Book of Revelation in Hastings' Bible Dictionary, 4:239-266. “It is the obvious advantage of the Vischer-Harnack hypothesis that it places the original work under Nero and its revised and Christianized edition under Domitian.” (Sanday, Inspiration, 371, 372, nevertheless dismisses this hypothesis as raising worse difficulties than it removes. He dates the Apocalypse between the death of Nero and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.) Martineau, Seat of Authority, 227, presents the moral objections to the apostolic authorship, and regards the Revelation, from chapter 4:1 to 22:5, as a purely Jewish document of the date 66-70, supplemented and revised by a Christian, and issued not earlier than 136: “How strange that we should ever have thought it possible for a personal attendant upon the ministry of Jesus to write or edit a book mixing up fierce Messianic conflicts, in which, with the sword, the gory garment, the blasting flame, the rod of iron, as his emblems, he leads the war-march, and treads the winepress of the wrath of God until the deluge of blood rises to the horses' bits, with the speculative Christology of the second century, without a memory of his life, a feature of his look, a word from his voice, or a glance back at the hillsides of Galilee, the courts of Jerusalem, the road to Bethany, on which his image must be forever seen!”
The force of this statement, however, is greatly broken if we consider that the apostle John, in his earlier days, was one of the “Boanerges, which is, Sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17), but became in his later years the apostle of love: 1 John 4:7—“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God.” The likeness of the fourth gospel to the epistle, which latter was undoubtedly the work of John the apostle, indicates the same authorship for the gospel. Thayer remarks that “the discovery of the gospel according to Peter sweeps away half a century of discussion. Brief as is the recovered fragment, it attests indubitably all four of our canonical books.” Riddle, in Popular Com., 1:25—“If a forger wrote the fourth gospel, then Beelzebub has been casting out devils for these eighteen hundred years.” On the genuineness of the fourth gospel, see Bleek, Introd. to N. T., 1:250; Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 33, also Beginnings of Christianity, 320-362, and Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, 245-309; Sanday, Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, Gospels in the Second Century, and Criticism of the Fourth Gospel; Ezra Abbott, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80-87; Row, Bampton Lectures on Christian Evidences, 249-287; British Quarterly, Oct. 1872:216; Godet, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 25; Westcott, in Bib. Com. on John's Gospel, Introd., xxviii-xxxii; Watkins, Bampton Lectures for 1890; W. L. Ferguson, in Bib. Sac., 1896:1-27.
(d) The epistle to the Hebrews appears to have been accepted during the first century after it was written (so Clement of Borne, Justin Martyr, and the Peshito Version witness). Then for two centuries, especially in the Roman and North African churches, and probably because its internal characteristics were inconsistent with the tradition of a Pauline authorship, its genuineness was doubted (so Tertullian, Cyprian, Irenæus, Muratorian Canon). At the end of the fourth century, Jerome examined the evidence and decided in its favor; Augustine did the same; the third Council of Carthage formally recognized it (397); from that time the Latin churches united with the East in receiving it, and thus the doubt was finally and forever removed.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew, “a learned man” and “mighty in the Scriptures” (Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.: “it is written” (Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10) with that of the Hebrews: “he saith” (8:5, 13), “he [pg 153]hath said” (4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way. Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna: “The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen: “God only knows who wrote it.” Harnack however remarks: “The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.” See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.
(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.
Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of the res gestæ.” See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.
It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of “your apostles” (3:2), just as Jude 17 speaks of “the apostles,” as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with “Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,” and Jude, “brother of James” (verse 1) was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.” Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle, “and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.” He also says: “John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.” He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.
Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks: “If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.” Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond a non liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter “is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”
Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that “the first piece of certain evidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.” Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.