Approaches to Eschatology

parousia70 said:

Name the other three please, and can you Define Independent for us?.
Are you claiming each of the 4 were totally unaware of the other 3's claims on the topic?

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No, there are four ante-Nicean accounts which clearly place either John's trial and banishment to Patmos or the giving of the Revelation as during the reign of Domatian. And each of these four give at least one detail that was included in none of the previous accounts. That, in and by itself, is hard proof that none of these four writers was simply relying on what any of the others wrote.

There were two ante-Nicene writers which made statements which could be interpreted to mean that the Revelation was given during the reign of Nero. But neither of these said anything that clearly stated any such thing.

Ant that is why essentially every historian who is not a Preterist concludes that John was banished to Patmos by Domatian, and that the Revelation was given at that time, not earlier, during the reign of Nero.

Proof of this takes many pages of evidence, so I will not repeat it here. But I have already posted it at: Why Historians Date the Revelation to the Reign of Domitian

LittleLambofJesus said:

What about this other Revelation.

Who's to say John couldn't have been taken away in the Spirit to Patmos after the Cross? Mt Tabor could also be symbolic of being spiritually on Patmos.

[I just created a thread on that for those interested]

THE OTHER "REVELATION OF ST JOHN"

CHURCH FATHERS: Revelation of St. John

After the taking up of our Lord Jesus Christ, I John was alone upon Mount Tabor, where also He showed us His undefiled Godhead; and as I was not able to stand, I fell upon the ground, and prayed to the Lord, and said: O Lord my God, who hast deemed me worthy to be Your servant, hear my voice, and teach me about Your coming........................
................And again I heard a voice saying to me: Behold, you have heard all these things, righteous John; deliver them to faithful men, that they also may teach others, and not think lightly of them, nor cast our pearls before swine, lest perchance they should trample them with their feet. Matthew 7:6

And what about this verse?

Rev 10:11
and he saith to me, 'It behoveth thee again to prophesy about peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings -- many.'

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Paul mentioned a man going to the 3rd heaven in 2 Corinthians:

2Co 12:2
I have known a man in Christ, fourteen years ago -- whether in the body I have not known, whether out of the body I have not known, God hath known -- such an one being caught away unto the third heaven;

.

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I am not interested in extra-Biblical "revelations."

keras said:

But what should interest you and be a tenet of your beliefs, is how ancient Israel are not the recipients of the Promises of God. For one thing, they are all dead, another is that the few known Israelites rejected Jesus and their descendants still do. Plain scripture says they have forfeited the Kingdom. Matthew 21:43

I posted this on another thread and will repeat it here to be sure you read it:
Role Reversal:
Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone that believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

However, it is only a few of the many generations of believers since the time of Jesus, who have understood the truth of how the amazing role reversals in God’s great plan have unfolded in world history. Consider: Jacob- Esau, Joseph - Reuben.
The majority who have been taught only part of the Gospel, now naively believe that Israel, namely the Jewish people as an ethnic group still have a place in God’s plan and the Christians will be removed to safety.

Amos 3:2 You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities. Amos 2:4-5

As everyone knows, the Jewish nation refused the leadership of Jesus Christ. Despite the fact of the free gift of the Lord’s unmerited favour being now available to all peoples, many Christians refuse to accept any termination of God’s grace towards physical Israel, instead insisting the salvation of all the Jews in Christ will happen when Jesus Returns. They do this because the separation of Israel and the Church is an immutable tenet of the rapture theory.

But the Old Testament prophets stated the redemption of the remnant of Israel was to happen in a way that would cause the roles to reverse when it occurred.

In the passage that speaks of Israel as the “clay” and the Lord as the “potter,” Jeremiah 18:1-6, saw how the Lord was going to reconfigure Israel from a flesh and blood family into a spiritual entity, through Jesus. John 3:16

Romans 9:8…It isn’t the children of Abraham by natural descent who are the people of God, but all those born into God’s Promise, Jesus, who are the true children of faith.

Isaiah 29:14-16 & Habakkuk 1:5 Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a great work and a wonder…Surely Your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? You will not believe this work when you are told of it.

The “work”, or the object of the potter’s effort, was the advent of Jesus and His atoning sacrifice for all people and it was performed to fulfill God’s promise to bring about the spiritual Israel of God, consisting of individuals from every race, nation and language. Revelation 5:9-10

As the Apostle Paul spoke Romans 9:21 to the Jews who rejected the salvation offered by Jesus, he indicated the long prophesied role reversal, in which the Lord’s chosen people transitioned from an earthly family to a Spiritual body, had occurred in the astonishing life of the carpenter from Nazareth: Matthew 28:19

Acts 13:26-27 Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and whosoever among you fears God, to you is the Word of this salvation sent. For they that dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every Sabbath day, that they have fulfilled those prophesies in condemning Jesus.

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35 Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: 36 If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. 37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD. 38 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the city shall be built to the LORD from the tower of Hananeel unto the gate of the corner. 39 And the measuring line shall yet go forth over against it upon the hill Gareb, and shall compass about to Goath. 40 And the whole valley of the dead bodies, and of the ashes, and all the fields unto the brook of Kidron, unto the corner of the horse gate toward the east, shall be holy unto the LORD; it shall not be plucked up, nor thrown down any more for ever. Jeremiah 31:35-40

keras said:

You deny then, that Jesus is the Seed of Israel?
I need say no more.

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I simply posted God's unequivocal statement that He would never, under any condition, do what you claimed He did.

keras said:

You deny then, that Jesus is the Seed of Israel?
I need say no more.

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There is not even one scripture anywhere that says Jesus is the seed of Israel. What it says is that Jesus is the seed of Abraham. That is a very different statement.

timtams said:

There is only one ante Nicene writer that places John clearly in the reign of Domitian and that is Victorinus. And he placed it early in his reign, not late as in Eusebius.

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I must apologize for saying that there were four ante-Nicene writers who said this. Actually only three of the four were ante-Nicene.

The first was Irenaeus. The second was Victorinus, and the third was the unknown writer of the “Acts of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John and the fourth truly ancient source was Jerome.

All of these either stated that the Revelation was given during the reign of Domatian, or stated that John's exile to Patmos was at that time. And every one of them gave details that none of the others gave. That proves, beyond the possibility of debate, that every one of them was relying on a source other than any of the other three.

Other writers who said the same things include the pseudo-Hyppolytus you spoke of, plus Sulpitius Severus.

The only source that is unquestionably previous to the sixth century and clearly said the Revelation was written before the reign of Domatian was the Panarion, by Epiphanius of Salamis, which was written in the late fourth century.

It is unreasonable to argue that this is even close to a reliable witness, for Epiphanius has John having prophesied not only during the time of Claudius, but even earlier, and has him returning from Patmos "under Claudius Caesar." The Christian Classics Ethereal Library says of Epiphanius, "He was lacking in knowledge of the world and of men, in sound judgment, and in critical discernment. He was possessed of a boundless credulity, now almost proverbial, causing innumerable errors and contradictions in his writings." Even the Preterist website Bible.org says of these statements by Epiphanius, "Unfortunately, Ephiphanius is also another example of inconsistent credibility in historical matters, in one place, for instance, making the unusual claim that Priscilla was a man! Therefore, this witness, too, must be taken with a grain of salt."

There is also a document called the Muratorian Canon, which is usually considered to have been written in the late second century. But what do we actually know about the Muratorian Canon? It is only a single sheet from a codex style manuscript. As this single sheet obviously does not contain the entirety of the original document, it is called the Muratorian Fragment. And the codex in which it is found is called Codex Muratorius, or sometimes the Muratorian Manuscript. In the nineteenth century this manuscript was examined in detail by Brooke Faust Wescott. This is the same Wescott of Wescott and Hort fame, who has pronounced favorably on manuscripts that numerous others, including the writer of this paper, completely reject. But here his judgment was exactly the opposite. He wrote concerning the "Muratorian Fragment:"

"The fragment from Ambrose (De Abrahamo, 1. 3. 15) which follows the Fragment on the Canon furnishes a fair criterion of the accuracy to be expected from the scribe. And by a remarkable accident the piece is more than usually instructive, for the whole fragment is repeated. Thus we have two copies of the same original and their divergence is a certain index of the inaccuracy of the transcriber which cannot be gainsaid. The second copy differs from the first in the following places:... [Here Wescott gave a line by line list of the differences in these fragments.]
"Thus in thirty lines there are thirty unquestionable clerical blunders including one important omission, (p. 11b 29), two other omissions which destroy the sense completely (p. 12a 11 merito, I9 dicitur), one substitution equally destructive of the sense (p. 12a 9 decem et octo for tau), and four changes which appear to be intentional and false alterations (p. 12a 6 scivit, 11 populosu exercitu, 23 filii, 25 sacrificat). We have therefore to deal with the work of a scribe either unable or unwilling to understand the work which he was copying, and yet given to arbitrary alteration of the text before him from regard simply to the supposed form of words...
"On the other hand the text itself as it stands is substantially a good one. The errors by which it is deformed are due to carelessness and ignorance and not to the badness of the source from which it was taken. But these errors are such as in several cases could not be rectified without other authorities for comparison.
"In the sheet which precedes the Fragment on the Canon the same phenomena appear. There is in that also the same ignorance of construction: the same false criticism: the same confusion of letters and terminations. If we now apply the results gained from the examination of the context to the Fragment on the Canon, part of it at least can be restored with complete certainty; and part may be pronounced hopelessly corrupt. It has been shown that a fragment of thirty lines contains three serious omissions and at least two other changes of words wholly destructive of the sense, and it would therefore be almost incredible that something of the like kind should not occur in a passage nearly three times as long. Other evidence shows that conjecture would have been unable to supply what is wanting or satisfactorily correct what is wrong in the one case, and there is no reason to hope it would be happier in the other." ("A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament," by Brooke Faust Wescott D.D., London, Macmillian and Company, 1866, 4th ed., 1875, pp. 522-524. - original not highlighted as shown here)

So we see that the famous textural critic, Wescott, who has been widely criticized for accepting questionable manuscripts, concluded that the scribe who copied out the Muratorian Canon was "given to arbitrary alteration of the text before him," and that the known errors in the Manuscript "are such as in several cases could not be rectified without other authorities for comparison."

But what "other authorities" do we have for comparison? The only known other copies of any portion of this Canon are twenty-four of its eighty-five lines included in a Prologue to the Epistles of Paul. This Prologue is contained in three eleventh century and one twelfth century manuscript of the Corpus Paulinum at the Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino, and was first published in Miscellanea Cassinese, ii (1897).

So, although many conclude that the Muratorian Canon was written in the late second century, all we really know about its date is that other than a manuscript copied out by an ignorant and careless scribe "given to arbitrary alteration of the text before him," the earliest known example was supposedly copied out in the seventh or eighth century. That is, it came out of the third or fourth century of the Medieval period of ignorance, long after the facts of history had been forgotten, and myth and superstition reigned supreme. As this was around five or six hundred years after the assumed date of the original, any amount of corruption of the original text was possible. No other scribe copied out any portion of this account until three or four hundred more years of this same Medieval darkness, although four copies of that work were made. So the Muratorian Canon cannot rationally be considered historically reliable as evidence for when the Revelation was given.