9.2. Alternatives to the Apostle John

³ Henry Barclay Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998, 1906), xlviii.

⁴ The facts of the internal textual elements themselves are not subjective, but deciding which are important and what they mean is highly subjective.

⁵ “Swete points to twenty-seven phrases in the early chapters that are matched up by nearly the same wording in the final chapters. ‘Such coincidences leave no doubt that the same writers has been at work.’ ”—Mal Couch, “The Literary Structure of Revelation,” in Mal Couch, ed., A Bible Handbook to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 70.

⁶ Isbon T. Beckwith, The Apocalypse of John (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001), 362,366.

⁷ Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John, clxxii.

⁸ “As for the authorship of the Apocalypse, Calvin suggested John Mark as a good candidate.”—Larry V. Crutchfield, “Revelation in the New Testament,” in Mal Couch, ed., A Bible Handbook to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 34.

⁹ “There is nothing in the New Testament or early tradition associating [John] Mark in this way with the Asian church.”—Beckwith, The Apocalypse of John, 347.

¹⁰ “There exist no significant linguistic similarities between Mark’s gospel and the Apocalypse, nor does the Evangelist display characteristics of a visionary possessed of a strong prophetic consciousness.”—Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1977), 25.