Based on everything we’ve discussed this far in regards to “Christ Before Jesus,” it is probably no surprise that Britt and Wingo once again make the claim that the book of Revelation is a compilation, that it’s written by multiple authors. What may be surprising is their claim that Revelation is not originally a Christian text, and that it had in fact been written in Hebrew, only to be edited later on with the addition of Jesus to it as it was translated to Greek.
Assuming that Revelation was originally written in Hebrew, that only adds complications to any stylometric reading, as we have already discussed; translators leave their mark on these texts. To compare a Hebrew text, which was translated to Greek, to other texts, is going to cause issues as the translator’s fingerprints are going to come through, and thus taint such readings.
That’s probably the least of the worries here though. While Britt and Wingo often claim that they aren’t working with conspiracy theories, and that they disavow conspiracy theories, that’s the territory they are getting into with their claim that Revelation was a Jewish text written in Hebrew.
This is a fringe view at best, one that generally suggests that it was actually Aramaic that Revelation was written in. The reason for that is that Hebrew was a language on the decline. Even among Jews, Hebrew was a dying language, that had, for centuries, been largely replaced with Aramaic. Either way though, there’s no evidence for the claim.
Now, technically, we could just throw out the claim by Britt and Wingo here. They have the burden of proof for their claim, and they fail to actually fulfill such. They provide no evidence for their claims; they simply state them as if they’re a fact. But to be thorough, let’s dive into it.
The closest thing they get to an argument is their flawed stylistic results, which show Revelation 4-22 coming up with the Septuagint. They make two claims here: first, that aspects of the original Hebrew being translated come through, which they don’t support. As they don’t know either Hebrew or Greek, how they could possibly just know this is also improbable. After all, they are relying on the English themselves.
The second claim is that since Revelation 4-22 comes up with the Septuagint and not later Jewish Greek texts, that definitely means it’s a translation. This makes absolutely no sense. They claim they included every Jewish text written in Greek they could find. One would assume this means they included the works of Josephus. So why doesn’t “The Jewish War” show up with these texts? After all, we know it was written in Aramaic, and then translated to Greek, as Josephus tells us. Later on in chapter 8, Britt and Wingo even confirm that they ran Josephus’s works. So shouldn’t we see him showing up?
No, because stylometry doesn’t tell us that sort of thing. This is just Britt and Wingo making up a claim to suit their needs here. So why would Revelation 4-22 appear close to some books in the Septuagint? Because Revelation references them hundreds of times.
When we look at the dendrogram that Britt and Wingo provide, we see that the closest book to Revelation is Daniel. This isn’t all that surprising. Steve Moyise, in his book, “The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation,” points out that John alludes to 27 different verses from Daniel.
But it goes further than that. Moyise states that “John appears to have modelled a number of his vision descriptions on episodes in Daniel.” Building on this, John then draws on the language of Daniel in order to enhance his own composition.
This isn’t all the surprising as, Gregory K Beale points out in his book, “John’s Use of the Old Testament in Revelation,” there is general acknowledgement that the book of Revelation contains more references to the Old Testament than any other New Testament work, with more than half of those references coming from the Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. But, in proportion to its length, Daniel has the most. Simply, Daniel is the most influential for John.
There is more to all of this though. Michelle Fletcher, in her book, “Reading Revelation as Pastiche,” argues that imitation was a part of the literary world at that time, and that we clearly see that occurring in Revelation. In part, what this is doing is creating a dialogue with past texts.
Now, Fletcher really brings this all together by specifying that Revelation is a pastiche. This is a practice of imitating and combining previous works. Simply put, what this means about Revelation is that the author was combining previous works, specifically Old Testament Texts, alluding to them, while also imitating that style.
To be clear, this isn’t simply copying of these prior works, but instead a way to create a host of connections.
Taking this all into consideration, it is no wonder that Revelation would be connected to Daniel stylistically. This would also explain why the connection that shows up in Britt’s and Wingo’s graph isn’t super strong, why there seems to be a good amount of distance between Revelation and Daniel. There is some similarity between the two, which makes sense with what we know about the book of Revelation, but the two are only loosely connected.
But what about the claim that Revelation was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic? We’ve already seen that their stylometric argument is bunk. This should make us question their understanding of stylometry in general, but moving on, what they are left with is a claim without support.
Since there are no specific arguments to look at, we can just look at the general topic. I find a great place to start with questions like this, concerning the books of the New Testament, is Bart Ehrman. The reason is rather simple; he tends to promote a mainstream view of scholarship in a way that is intelligible to non-academic readers. In other words, he makes the material simple, and generally relates what the consensus view is.
In this case, Ehrman has a book dedicated to the topic of Revelation, titled “Armageddon.” The idea that Revelation was written in Aramaic simply isn’t mentioned. Instead, the assumption is that it was written in Greek. That’s just a given.
What is mentioned though is that the Greek it’s written in isn’t very good. It’s some of the worst of all of the New Testament. Ehrman does address this with a few possibilities. One common view among scholars is that Greek wasn’t the author’s first language, that it was instead Hebrew or Aramaic. Because Greek was a second language, it explains why the style and grammar are shoddy. But then other scholars reject this notion, saying there is “no good evidence to suggest he was more accustomed to a Semitic language.”
Others claim that Revelation was intentionally written mysteriously, but as Ehrman argues, the grammar is never mysterious; it’s just bad. Then there is the suggestion that the author is using “street lingo.” Such a view lacks evidence though.
Ehrman instead concludes that John simply didn’t write well. Which isn’t a major deal, as many people can’t. Regardless of all of this, the idea that it was originally written in Aramaic isn’t even a consideration.
Looking at the physical evidence, our earliest and best manuscripts of Revelation are all in Greek. There are no ancient Aramaic manuscripts. No early Christian writer, no church father, ever mentioned that Revelation was written in Aramaic either. It’s not until much later that we get an Aramaic translation of the text.
Besides the Greek manuscripts though, we also have third-century writers who mention how bad John’s Greek is. Dionysius of Alexandria, writing sometime in the first half of the third century, and cited by Eusebius’ Ecclesiastic History, states that John’s “use of the Greek language is not accurate, but that he employs barbarous idioms, in some places committing downright solecisms.”
There is simply no evidence that it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and instead, everything we have points to it being a Greek text.
The conclusion that Britt and Wingo come to then, that the dating of Revelation isn’t important as the original didn’t include any mention of Christ, and that the final revised version came out in the second century, is completely invalidated.