Msg#: 1598                   Date: 03-24-95  13:33
  From: John Musselwhite
    To: Kyle Oram
  Subj: Age of Texts

 KO> You are not necessarily correct about the John the Baptist never
 KO> wrote any of the books referring to Jesus.  The authorship of
 KO> Revelation is uncertain and John the Baptist is one of the
 KO> possibilities.

    By the time Jesus was well into his ministry J the B had already
    lost his head. The chances he actually wrote _anything_ are
    between slim and none, let alone something like Revelation.

    As for it's authorship being uncertain you are quite correct. It's
    attributed to a "John" in the first line, and traditionally it was
    thought that the author was the apostle John son of Zebedee, also
    traditionally thought to be the author of John's Gospel and the
    three epistles. Of course, the tremendous differences in
    vocabulary, style and thought between the fourth gospel and
    Revelation makes it extremely unlikely they were written by the
    same person.

    Back to John the Baptist... Revelation 1:4 refers to the "seven
    churches which are in Asia", and of course, there were no
    "churches" as such in Asia until Paul's time, eliminating the
    Baptist as the author. Most scholars agree it was written at least
    60 years after John the Baptists death anyway, somewhere around 95
    C.E. when Paul's church was already established.

    In short, there is absolutely NO reason to believe the Baptist
    wrote it. The author is either some unknown "John" or perhaps (and
    most likely) a community writing and using the name "John" to give
    it some credibility since a Johannine community already existed.

        John