Positive External Evidence for Revelation’s Early Date
Despite popular opinion, the Book of Revelation does not undermine the postmillennial hope. If fact, it does the opposite: it underscores. But before one can interpret Revelation properly he must understand when John wrote it. In that it is important to determine the date of Revelation in order to understand what John was writing about, I have been looking at the internal evidence in Revelation which shows that it was written prior to the Jewish temple’s destruction in AD 70. In this posting I will provide a brief sample of early-date evidence from church history and tradition. I will summarize the evidence from four early Christian writings.
1. The Shepherd of Hermas
The Shepherd of Hermas is little known among evangelical laymen today. But in the first three centuries of the Christian era it was so influential that Irenaeus, Origen, Jerome and many others deemed it canonical. [1] It even appears in the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the best preserved ancient copies of the whole Bible. [2]
Virtually all scholars agree that the Shepherd of Hermas draws upon Revelation as the source of its imagery — even late date advocates like H. B. Swete, R. H. Charles, and Robert Mounce. [3] This would demand that Revelation be written, copied, and circulated prior to the composition of the Shepherd.
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