The Eleven-Year Window

When did John write the book of Revelation? Have you ever thought about that? It’s actually a matter of some controversy.

Anyone familiar with the various schools of eschatological interpretation will immediately see why dating Revelation matters, and matters quite a bit to those invested in it. Preterists believe most of John’s visions chronicled in chapters 1 through 19 came to pass not long after he wrote, fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Roman army in AD70. Futurists believe little corresponding to most of these events has yet taken place.

Getting into the Text

The stakes are also much higher for the Preterist side of the argument. If John wrote in AD95, or, in fact, any time after AD66 or thereabouts, Christians who hold to the inspiration of the book of Revelation can write off any Preterist interpretation entirely. It’s rubbish. For the Futurist, the stakes are inconsequential. An early date for Revelation changes nothing significant about the way he looks at the book. He simply interprets the prophetic word more literally than his Preterist brothers in Christ.

The extra-biblical argument for a late date is well documented online if you are interested in exploring it. Beyond a quick glance, I’m not. As is always the case with arguments about the opinions of the church fathers, some experts say this and some say that, and there’s usually a trend one way or another that will change sometime next century, and much-disputed allegations about when the Church is alleged to have believed what, as if that makes any difference to finding truth. I find the external evidence for a late date more compelling than an early date, but that’s neither here nor there. You would expect me to.

I’m much more interested in the internal arguments from the text of scripture itself. These are less explored. Specifically, in today’s post I’d like to look at the practical implications of an early date for Revelation.

We will need to establish exactly how early that date must be in order for the Preterist interpretation of Revelation to be valid.

Methodology and Background

As we try to work out the practical implications of an early date for Revelation, I will frequently make use of a standard timeline of the book of Acts. Acts is important in this argument because apart from a few passing references in the epistles, it’s all the inspired church history we have to work with beyond Revelation itself. You can find that timeline here. It should be uncontroversial. Luke’s history takes us up to about AD62, well before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. The earliest date I can find for the writing of Acts is AD63. That comes from a schema that dates Revelation to AD70, so having Acts written seven years earlier should be agreeable to both sides of the debate.

First, a little background. John wrote the book of Revelation to seven churches. He did not choose them, the Lord did. Not one of the seven churches was in Judea or anywhere near it. The seven churches were located in what is now western Turkey, all within a little over 100 miles from the Mediterranean coast. Here’s a link to an interactive map of their locations. You can use the minus key to back up and see where they were in relation to Israel. The closest church of the seven to Judea was something like 1,000 miles away by road.

That brings up the first and most obvious question: Where is the church in Jerusalem on this list of seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3? Why are all the churches John wrote to so far away from the center of God’s dealings with humanity up to that point in history?

Two Possibilities

Despite the persecution that broke out after Stephen’s murder, temporarily driving many believers into other parts of Judea, Jerusalem had pulled itself together and was still such a going concern in AD48 when Paul and Barnabas visited to discuss the circumcision question. Luke writes not just of apostles and elders hiding in Jerusalem, but of “the whole church” there. Significant numbers of Jewish believers were still gathering in Jerusalem in AD56-57 when Paul wrote Romans. If the Preterists correctly date Revelation, it would be surprising to find no Christian presence at all in Jerusalem when John wrote.

The Preterist may say, “Well, sending letters to Asia is just proof that the Church had replaced Israel as the focus of God’s plans and purposes for the world by the time John wrote.” The Futurist may say, “Really? Before AD70, when the Lord was still graciously calling national Israel to repentance and faith in Christ?” He may also ask, “Would not the members of the church in Jerusalem have a massive personal interest in reading that the Lord was about to destroy the city in which they were living? Had the Lord given up caring for his children who remained in Judea?”

Unless, of course, Revelation is not about the Roman invasion of Judea at all. At very least, the choice of seven churches in Gentile territory should make us stop and think.

A Legit Preterist Date for Revelation

Okay, then. How early do Preterists need John to have written Revelation? Revelation is prophecy. Both sides agree that from chapter 4 on, it’s about events that were then-future. “Come up here,” says the voice like a trumpet to John, “and I will show you what must take place after this.” That’s right at the beginning of the prophetic part of the book.

This being the case, if the Preterists are right that most of the book was fulfilled by AD70, the entire prophecy had to be in circulation prior to the spring of AD66, when Roman procurator Gessius Florus seized temple funds and triggered riots in Jerusalem, which the Romans quickly suppressed by massacring civilians. Things escalated into full-blown rebellion over the next few years. In the Preterist view of Revelation, that would begin to fulfill the prophecies of Revelation 6, in which the first six of seven seals are opened and four horsemen begin to take peace from the earth. (The Greek word for “earth” is the same as “land”. Preterists would say this refers specifically to the land of Judea. Futurists are happy with “earth”.)

Short version: for a Preterist interpretation of Revelation to have any value to the early church, the book would have needed to be in circulation before the beginning of that conflict. Logically, if the conflict began fulfilling John’s prophecy in spring AD66 when the Preterist’s version of the horsemen rode out, John cannot have written Revelation much later than the fall of AD65. Any later and it would be a recording of history, not a legitimate prophecy. Perhaps for this reason, Preterist Kenneth Gentry dates Revelation to the “mid to late 60s”.

That requires a very compact timeframe for the history of the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3. It gives us a maximum eleven-year window for the entire history of every church in Asia to which John wrote.

Squeezing a Lot into Eleven Years

Why eleven years, you ask? Of the seven churches addressed in Revelation 2-3, the NT mentions only two elsewhere. We know nothing about the rest. Paul’s first missionary journey in AD48 took him and Barnabas through central Turkey no further west than Pisidian Antioch. He did not reach Ephesus until his second missionary journey in Acts 18 and the church there was not established until Acts 19, around AD54.

Of all the seven churches, let’s concede it’s remotely possible that Laodicea, a little over 100 miles inland from the Mediterranean, was evangelized from the east by converts from Pisidian Antioch or another city in which Paul and Barnabas established churches during that first missionary journey. Given the way the seven are clustered, however, and the hundreds of miles to be traveled, it’s far more likely none of the churches in cities to which John wrote were actually established until Paul’s second missionary journey, meaning in AD54 or afterward.

If John wrote in the fall of AD65, that’s an eleven-year age window for every one of the seven churches from the time they were established to the time at which the Lord described their condition in Revelation 2 and 3, and probably an even smaller window for those churches further east.

Well then, how do the letters to the seven churches hold up when we make every church the Lord addresses eleven years of age or fewer?

Looking at the Letters

The Lord commends three churches of the seven for their “patient endurance”, one of which was Ephesus. In AD57, three years after it was established, Paul called the elders of the church to Miletus (Acts 20). At that point, the church in Ephesus appears to have been in decent shape. Paul never mentions they were experiencing persecution or anything they might have to endure. The apostle did warn of trouble coming (“After my departure fierce wolves will come in among you” and “from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things”) and counseled them to be alert, but what we see in the Lord’s correction of Revelation 2 suggests the elders did their jobs in resisting false doctrine. In any case, that means the Preterists have to fit the “patient endurance” for which the Lord commends Ephesus into an eight-year period between AD57 and AD65. Could be, I guess.

To Pergamum, the Lord says, “You did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.” That phrasing is interesting if the Lord is addressing a church eleven years old or younger. Antipas was killed “among them”, and the church remained faithful. But those words “the days of” suggest some greater period may have passed. You don’t generally use the phrase to describe events that occurred yesterday, last week or even a few years ago. They speak to an era of some length some time in the past. The NT writers use them of “the days of Noah”, “the days of Herod” (by a man writing at least 20 years after Herod’s days ended), and the “days of the taxing” (AD6, written about in AD62) in which Judas of Galilee rose up. Can we fit these events in the eleven-or-fewer years that the church in Pergamum had existed? Maybe. Or are we squishing them in just to maintain the faint possibility of a Preterist interpretation for Revelation?

To Thyatira, the Lord says of Jezebel, “I have given her time to repent.” Maybe he means a few months or a year, but the Lord is unusually gracious by our standards when he grants time for repentance. The Amorites got 400 years.

Twice the Lord mentions a “synagogue of Satan”, which stands in contrast to Paul’s “temple of God”, the church. These unbelieving Jews were certainly Satan’s servants, in thrall to him as they slandered the Christians in Smyrna and harassed those in Philadelphia. So why a synagogue rather than a temple of Satan, which would be the more obvious (and biting) comparison? Perhaps the churches in Asia were more familiar with synagogues than the temple in Jerusalem?

Then again, maybe there was no temple left standing in Jerusalem when John wrote.

In Summary

In fact, if we read the letters naturally, all these churches sound less like youthful works and more like mature entities that had been around for a while, established track records that showcased their desirable and less-desirable qualities, and were ripe for serious evaluation. They had “works”, and some had “first works” and “latter works”. Ephesus had “abandoned the love [it] had at first”. That sounds like the sort of decline that doesn’t happen overnight. An eleven-year-old church is just getting its legs under it. Can we picture the Lord writing off the church in Ephesus, taking away its lampstand only eight years after that brand new church was in commendable shape?

On the other hand, if the Futurists are right and we are positing an AD90s timeframe for Revelation, Ephesus and some of the other seven churches would have been forty years old when John wrote. Might not a continuous and prolonged decline in love over more than a generation better explain the Lord’s concern?

Nothing in the text conclusively rules out the possibility of the Lord writing with such consternation and approval to seven churches each of which had fewer than eleven years to establish track records before being evaluated. The Preterists may rest easy on that score. Nevertheless, any objective reader has to admit a thirty- to forty-year age range for these churches gives us a much more harmonious fit with the text than the schema their theology requires of them.