REVELATION,** the name of one of the sacred books of the New Testament, containing revelations concerning several important doctrines of Christianity. The word is Greek, and derived from ἀποκαλύπτειν, to reveal, or discover.

This book, according to Irenæus, was written about the year 96 of Christ, in the island of Patmos, whither St John had been banished by the emperor Domitian. But Sir Isaac Newton places the writing of it earlier, viz. in the time of Nero. Some attribute this book to the arch-heretic Cerinthus; but the ancients unanimously ascribed it to John, the son of Zebedee, and brother of James; whom the Greek fathers call the Divine, by way of eminence, to distinguish him from the other evangelists. This book has not, at all times, been esteemed canonical. There were many churches in Greece, as St Jerome informs us, which did not receive it; neither is it in the catalogue of canonical books prepared by the council of Laodicea, nor in that of St Cyril of Jerusalem; but Justin, Irenæus, Origen, Cyprian, Clemens of Alexandria, Tertullian, and all the fathers of the fourth, fifth, and the following centuries, quote the Revelations as a book then acknowledged to be canonical. The Alogians, Marcionites, Cerdonians, and Luther himself rejected this book; but the Protestants have forlorn Luther in this particular; and Beza has strongly maintained against his objections, that the Apocalypse is authentic and canonical.

The Apocalypse consists of twenty-two chapters. The three first are an instruction to the bishops of the seven churches of Asia Minor. The fifteen following chapters contain the persecutions which the church was to suffer from the Jews, heretics, and Roman emperors. Next St John prophesies of the vengeance of God, which he will exercise against those persecutors, against the Roman empire, and the city of Rome; which, as the Protestants suppose, he describes under the name of Babylon the great whore, seated upon seven In the last place, the 19th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd chapters, describe the triumph of the church over its enemies, the marriage of the Lamb, and the happiness of the church triumphant.

"It is a part of this prophecy (says Sir Isaac Newton), that it should not be understood before the last age of the world; and therefore it makes for the credit of the prophecy, that it is not yet understood. The folly of interpreters has been to foretell times and things by this prophecy, as if God designed to make them prophets. By this raiment they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise: He gave this and the prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men's curiosity, by enabling them to foreknow things: but that, after they were fulfilled, they might be interpreted by the events; and his own providence, not the interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world. And there is already so much of the prophecy fulfilled, that as many as will take pains in this study, may see sufficient instances of God's providence."

There have been several other works published under the title of Apocalypses. Sozomen mentions a book used in the churches of Palestine, called the Apocalypse, or Revelation of St Peter. He also mentions an Apocalypse of St Paul; which the Copts retain to this day. Eusebius also speaks of both these Apocalypses. St Epiphanius mentions an Apocalypse of Adam; Nicephorus, an Apocalypse of Eldras; Gratian and Cedrenus, an Apocalypse of Moses, another of St Thomas, and another of St Stephen; St Jerom, an Apocalypse of Elias. Porphyry, in his life of Plotin, makes mention of the Apocalypse or Revelations of Zoroaster, Zostrian, Nicothaeus, Allogenes, &c.