Postmillennial Worldview

PMT 2014-049 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.

This is the second in a four-part series on Revelation’s Hebraic character. Rev’s intensely Jewish style comports well with a focus on the events associated with Christ’s judgment on Israel and the closing of the old covenant order in AD 70. In this study I will note its extremely Hebraic grammar.

Beginning at least as early as Dionysius of Alexandria (cf. Euseb., Eccl. Hist. 7:25:26–27) Christian scholars comment on John’s awkward, Semitic-influenced grammar. Schlesinger cites E. C. Selwynn’s complaint regarding John’s grammar: it would be a “disgrace” to an “English fifth-form school-boy” because it involves “hopelessly bad Greek.” Schlesinger notes that “the solecisms of the Apocalypse remain virtually indetectable to the English reader. English translations smooth out the awkward grammar of the apocalyptist so that the reader of the English is never ‘stopped in mid-course and confounded.” Continue reading →