January 2022

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 2: The Revelation of Christ as God

In our opening presentation in this series, we offered a description of the antiquity of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Revelation, and also sought to establish the approximate time and place of the authorship of the work, including the fact that it was written by the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, who also wrote the Gospel bearing his name, and the epistles which have been attributed to him from the earliest times. Doing that, we cited Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome, Victorinus of Pettau, and the Acts of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John. Our purpose was to exhibit the fact that from these eight ancient second and third-century Christian sources, a rather consistent narrative is presented in which it may be determined that the apostle John wrote his Gospel account, was imprisoned in exile on Patmos at an undetermined time in the reign of the emperor Domitian, and upon the death of Domitian he returned to Ephesus, where he penned the Revelation of Yahshua Christ. It is not certain when he may have written his three surviving epistles.

While doing that we also presented and discussed the arguments of one of the earliest skeptics of John’s authorship of the Revelation, Dionysius of Alexandria. So we hope to have also convincingly explained how the arguments of Dionysius are all faulty or without merit, and after the faults are elucidated he really has no arguments remaining to provide a substantial basis for his doubt.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 1: An Introduction

Here, after eleven years, we shall revisit our commentary on the Revelation of Yahshua Christ with a new presentation, and of course it shall be based on the text as it is presented in the Christogenea New Testament. Our first version of this commentary was originally presented in fourteen podcasts from December of 2010 through April of 2011. While there are several reasons for wanting to replace our old commentary, here I will only state that I hope to expand some portions of the original while also offering some clarifications, rewriting or further expounding on some of our explanations. I also hope to more thoroughly cross-reference portions of parallel prophecies which are found in the books of the prophets, especially in Ezekiel, Daniel, Obadiah, Zechariah and Malachi.

Later that same year I first published Christreich, which is the title of a book which had encapsulated the original podcast commentary. While we hope this new commentary will be more comprehensive, I do not foresee adding much to the interpretations themselves. But while I cannot yet rule that out completely, I do not think that this new version will invalidate anything I had written there, except for one note which must be corrected at Revelation chapter 20, verse 5, which I shall discuss further below. This commentary, and even this introduction, shall be founded on the edited text of Christreich rather than the notes for the original podcasts. For that reason, I was tempted to title this series “Christreich 2.0” or something similar, but I decided to stay with our more traditional scheme. That title may be appropriate if Yahweh God permits me to publish a second edition of the book, something which I certainly hope to achieve.