13. Nicolaitans

⁵ “We conclude that Nicolaitanism was an antinomian movement whose antecedents can be traced in the misrepresentation of Pauline liberty, and whose incidence may be connected with the special pressures of emperor worship and pagan society.”—Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), 94.

⁶ Thomas, Revelation 1-7, 189.

⁷ Richard Chenevix Trench, Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in Asia (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1861), 82-83.

⁸ “The doctrine relevant to the downfall resulting from Balaam’s counsel advocates that the people of God commit sexual immorality or intermarry with the heathen and compromise in the matter of idolatrous worship.”—Walvoord, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 68.

⁹ Henry Barclay Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998, 1906), lxxii.

¹⁰ Ibid., lxxi.

¹¹ A similar example of compromise of relevance to our own day is found in Christians who continue to participate in Masonic orders.

¹² “The value of Irenaeus’s references to the Nicolaitans is doubtful. The primary passage (adv. Haer. 1.26.3) tells us that they followed Nicolaus, one of the seven deacons of Acts Acts 6:5, but adds nothing which might not have been inferred from the Revelation. In a passing remark in 3.11.7 he treats them as the earliest representative of the error of Cerinthus and ascribes to them a Gnostic cosmology. That however might be an inference from a tradition connecting John’s opponents with the ‘gnosis falsely so called’ of 1Ti. 1Ti. 6:20, to which Irenaeus here appears to refer.”—Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting, s.v. “Irenaeus Questionable on Nicolaitans.”

¹³ Fruchtenbaum, The Footsteps of Messiah, 51.

¹⁴ Old Testament priests were Levites. New Testament priests wear levis!