Dating of Revelation And The Death of The Apostles
Part One of Two

The dating of Revelation continues to be a subject of intense discussion and research. While it is true that the majority of modern scholars accept the late first century dating of the Apocalypse, there has been, over the last 30-40 years (perhaps earlier) more of a movement toward the early (Pre-AD 70) dating of the Apocalypse. Authors such as Foy Wallace, (The Book of Revelation, 1966); John A. T. Robinson, (Redating the NT, 1976); Kenneth Gentry, Before Jerusalem Fell, 1989); Jonathan Bernier (Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament, 2022), and a host of other scholars have written challenging the “traditional” dating. My own book, Who Is This Babylon addresses the issue as well.

I propose that a commonly overlooked theme enables us to confidently posit the dating of Revelation before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. While some scholars make brief comments related to what I will present, I have not yet found one that develops the idea as I will do here. In fact, a search on Google Scholar found a few articles that mention what I will present but none develop the significance of the subject. (If any reader is aware of such discussions please feel free to contact me with that resource).

This article will discuss the critical relationship between the martyrdom of the apostles and the dating of Revelation. More specifically, we will examine what Jesus, Paul and John all present concerning the apostolic martyrdom and the coming Day of the Lord for the vindication of the martyrs. We begin with Matthew 23:29-39: which is a foundational text for the Biblical doctrine of the avenging of the blood of the martyrs.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ “Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’

Notice that in the parallel text of Luke 11:49, Jesus said “Therefore the wisdom of God also said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute,’”

Jesus chronicled the long and bloody history of Jerusalem killing the prophets. They would continue their violence against his own prophets, and apostles. For brevity I will confine my comments to the subject of apostolic martyrdom although the wider subject of prophetic martyrdom is also significant for the dating of Revelation. See my Who Is This Babylon book for that discussion.

The Lord said that in slaying his apostles Jerusalem would fill up the measure of her blood guilt, a guilt that had been accumulating, for a long, long time. This is no random statement. It was a declaration that his generation, the generation of the apostles that he was sending, was the climactic generation, the one upon whom the wrath of God would fall:

Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate.

We thus have, in the definitive, foundational “martyrdom” NT text, the unambiguous declaration that the first century was the generation to fill up the measure of blood guilt. That blood guilt would be filled up by the killing of the Jesus’ apostles. And that blood guilt would bring down the catastrophic judgment and destruction of Jerusalem.

Paul strongly echoed the words of Jesus in his first epistle to the Thessalonians:

For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they do not please God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins; but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16).

As William Hendrickson and Simon Kistemaker note, “It is probable that the apostle was thinking of the actual words of Jesus with respect to the Jews” (William Hendrickson and Simon Kistemaker, New Testament Commentary, Thessalonians, The Pastorals, and Hebrews, (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2002), 72).

Paul, like Jesus, accused the Jews of killing the OT prophets as well as the apostles of Christ. In addition, they resisted the conversion of the Gentiles. All of these actions worked together, “so as to fill up the measure of their sins.” As Gregory Beale notes, “ Paul is stating that the sinful behavior of the first century Jews is part of a national pattern of past generations and is reaching a climax in their persecution of Christ, Christian prophets and apostles and in hindering of the preaching of gospel to the Gentiles” (Gregory Beale, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series, 1-2 Thessalonians, Grant R. Osborne series editor (Downers Grove, ILL: IVP Press, 2003), 85). Like Jesus, Paul ties the persecution of the apostles and prophets by the Jews to the filling up of the measure of Israel’s sin and he delimits that to the first century generation. This means that the wrath that Paul has in mind, ‘the wrath of God has come upon them to the uttermost” should be viewed– contra Jeffrey Weima who suggests that Paul was speaking of very recent tragic events in Jerusalem (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, 1-2 Thessalonians 2014 (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2014), 176-177) – as the impending judgment of Jerusalem. In other words, since Paul is echoing Matthew 23, that is highly suggestive that he has in mind the same judgment that Jesus foretold.

It should perhaps be noted at this juncture that Jesus and Paul were not speaking of “apostles” in the generic sense of “one sent.” Rather, they both had the specific technical term in mind that is defined in Acts 1:21-22. There, the qualifications for being an apostle are quite specific and temporally delimited:

Therefore, of these men who have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John to that day when He was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of His resurrection.

The point therefore, is that when Jesus and Paul both spoke of Israel filling the measure of their sin by killing the apostles that this restricts the filling up of the measure of sin / martyrdom to the first century generation.

Contra Kistamaker (New Testament Commentary, 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids, Baker, 1993, p. 138), who suggests that Paul was speaking of apostles in the widest sense, Richard Hayes says that Paul was speaking of the apostolic suffering, “not merely as misfortunes or trials to be surmounted but as identifying marks of the authenticity of his apostleship, because they manifest his conformity to the sufferings of Christ” (Interpretation, 1 Corinthians (Louisville, John Knox, 1997),72).

To suggest that John in Revelation (or Paul in Thessalonians for that matter), is ignoring the specific identity of the apostles that Jesus referred to seems to be disjunctive. Why ignore what Jesus said about apostolic suffering to fill up the measure of sin when Jesus placed so much emphasis on it?

So, I suggest that unless John in Revelation was speaking of a totally different entity that was guilty of killing the OT prophets, of being where the Lord was crucified, and the blood of the apostles and prophets of Jesus being found in her, this is highly suggestive, if not definitively probative, that Revelation was written at the time when Jesus’ apostles were slain by Jerusalem. In fact this raises a serious chronological challenge to the traditional dating.

This connection is recognized by some noted scholars.

John A. T. Robinson argued that Revelation was written under Nero. He sees the Neronian persecution — precisely the persecution associated with the deaths of Peter and Paul—as the historical context that makes sense of Revelation’s persecution imagery (See John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 221–253, especially chapter 8, “The Book of Revelation.”). While Jonathan Bernier does not rely extensively on the apostolic martyrdom for the early dating of Revelation, he nonetheless, does refer to that martyrdom as complimentary evidence (Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2022), 118+. He also has a helpful discussion of how the controversy about eating of meats better fits and early dating of Revelation, but we are not concerned with that issue here).

I want now to present some evidence that I consider extremely powerful for establishing the early dating of Revelation. While some scholars take note of the apostolic suffering, I have not found this issue essayed sufficiently.

Consider what Paul had to say about his own suffering– and that of the apostles:

1 Corinthians 4:9

For I think that God has displayed us, the apostles, last, as men condemned to death; for we have been made a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.

As Anthony Thiselton says, “Paul introduces the metaphor of a great pageant, in which criminals, prisoners, or professional gladiators process to the gladiatorial ring, with the apostles bringing up the rear as those who must fight to the death” (Anthony Thiselton, New International Greek Text Commentary, 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Paternoster, 2000), 359). The stunning reality is that Paul is positing the apostles as the “last to die” in the parade of God’s martyrs! (Interestingly, Thiselton does not address this aspect of Paul’s statement. He merely discusses the position of the apostles in the parade, at the end, without discussing the significance of that for the subject of filling the measure of the martyrs). Some translators (NIV, TNT) render the text as “at the end of the procession”, “at the very end of the victory procession.” What too many commentators miss however, sometimes simply glossing over or ignoring, is that the imagery virtually demands that Paul was indeed positing that the apostles were the last of martyrs destined to suffer for Christ.

Notice how Paul’s imagery conforms perfectly to what Jesus said in Matthew 23. He chronicled the past bloody history of Jerusalem in slaying God’s messengers. He tells them that they will fill up the measure of their father’s guilt. And they will do so by slaying the apostles and prophets that Jesus would send. That means that the apostles truly were the last in the parade of martyrs and it was their martyrdom that truly did fill up that measure of suffering!

In the same way, 1 Corinthians 4:9 confirms what the apostle himself said in 1 Thessalonians 2, where he said that the Jews were persecuting the apostles and prophets “so as to fill up the measure of their sin always.” Thus, once again, we have the apostles posited as the last in the martyrs parade!

Now, of course, Christ’s apostles were patently not the last Christians to die for their faith. But that was not what Paul was saying. He was alluding to the idea of filling up the measure of the martyrs that he had earlier mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16). He was following the pattern found in Matthew 23, Luke 11 and Luke 13 in which Jesus posited his apostles as being the faithful victims to fill up the measure of the martyrs. And another of Paul’s epistles drives this home.

Colossians 1:24-27

I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church, 25 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God which was given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God, 26 the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints.

Scot McKnight says this text: “has become a storm center of controversy for commentators.” McKnight says that “The apocalyptic or eschatological view has become the most attractive theory; as there was an appointed number of sufferings in the ‘messianic woes,’ or the exilic conditions of Israel (e.g., Daniel 7:21-23, 25-27; 12:1-3; Habukkuk 3:15; Zephaniah 1:13; Mark 13:5-8; Matthew 24:4-8; Luke 21:8-11).” There is very strong scholarly attestation for this view. A Perplexity search produced a list of scholars with confirmed quotes including Delling, O’Brien, Lohse, Moule, Moo, all of whom support the idea that Paul was definitely speaking of filling up the measure of end time martyrdom. Yet, McKnight rejects this view on the grounds that it is “too schematic, if not too abstract; rather, it is the formulaic nature of thinking that Paul was talking about the messianic woes explicitly in quantitative terms that weakens the proposal.” (P. 189). He says “For this view to work, Paul has to think that the messianic woes have not yet been completed. That is, one has to think Jesus dies because of the messianic woes were upon him but were not exhausted. (P. 189).

What I find striking about McKnight’s objection is that he says not a word about the sufferings of Christ here in Colossians in light of Matthew 23 and Paul’s earlier epistle (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16). In Thessalonians it is clear that Paul did not believe that the Messianic Woes had already been filled up since he viewed the Jewish persecution of the church taking place “so as to fill up the measure of her sin always.” Nor does McKnight mention Revelation 6:9-11 where the Spirit spoke of the necessity for the making of more martyrs. Was that not a statement that the Messianic Woes were not yet full? Of course, in all three of these texts there is a definite use of “quantitative terms” in regard to filling up the measure of martyrdom. Yet, McKnight objects to that idea in this text.

There is in fact an almost bewildering array of different views about what Paul meant when he said that he was filling up in his flesh what was lacking in the afflictions (thlipsis) of Christ. An examination of numerous commentators reveals a rather amazing tendency to literally ignore any relationship between Paul’s sufferings to fill up the measure of Christ’s sufferings and what Jesus taught in Matthew 23. Likewise, what the apostle himself said about filling the measure of apostolic martyrdom is seldom mentioned and what Revelation teaches about this same subject is seldom harmonized with Jesus and Paul. Yet, unless we wish to posit the idea that Jesus, Paul and Revelation each had an independent concept of the filling up of the measure of suffering and martyrdom, it seems the wiser course is to harmonize each of these texts and see them all pointing in the same direction.

When we do this, it seems apparent that Paul envisioned himself – along with the other apostles – as playing a distinct role in the end time drama. For instance, he saw himself as the “minister of the New Covenant” (2 Corinthians 3). He saw himself and the apostles as the ambassadors (presbeuomen) of the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:20 – this meant that he was a special delegate of the King himself). And here, he saw himself as the oikonomian, (v. 26) the steward of the Gospel ministry/ mystery and the end time martyr. (In the first century, a steward was given absolute authority over the household of the Master. They could delegate duties and even administer punishment if need be, as well as having total administrative authority, subject only to the Master). All of this communicates in a very powerful way Paul’s apostolic authority and distinctive role.

Part One To here. Part Two coming soon