The Textual Reliability of John's Revelation

[Greg Stafford]

New Blog on Watching the Ministry, "The Textual Reliability of John's Revelation." Link: elihubooks.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-textual-reliability-of-johns.html.

This gets back to a question Metroactus had asked about the reliability of the text of Revelation. Hopefully this article helps answer some of the more important issues and questions.

Anyone who would like to discuss anything pertaining to the textual history, credibility, or content (variants, etc.) of John's Revelation can do so in this thread.

Additional threads around specific Revelation texts can be started, if necessary. Otherwise, most if not all textual questions involving John's Revelation should be considered in this thread.

Best regards,
Greg Stafford
CWJ Forum Moderator

[Deleted]

Quick question:

In your article you refer to several papyri as P18 etc... Can you explain that for me - I realize they are corresponding papyri but what and where technically can we view or read about them further?

Thanks,
Jordan

[Greg Stafford]

Mar 16, 2013 13:30:02 GMT -8 @jordan said:

Quick question:

In your article you refer to several papyri as P18 etc... Can you explain that for me - I realize they are corresponding papyri but what and where technically can we view or read about them further?

Thanks,
Jordan

Hello, Jordan:

As you indicate, the "P" stands for "papyri." These New Testament papyri are best outlined and discussed in Kurt and Barbara Aland's The Text of the New Testament, pages 83-102. Pages 96-102 lists out the papyri in order of their numbers along with a descriptive listing of the contents of each item.

Newer versions of this work may have slightly different pages and listings of papyri, based on recent findings.

An easy, online listing of these papyri and their NT contents is here: www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/texte/Papyri-list.html.

Also, I added a note [13] to my "Textual Reliability" article (link: elihubooks.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-textual-reliability-of-johns.html). I added it to the end of the paragraph beginning with, "Each time I consider," and then of course in full form at the close of the Notes section, namely:

[13] The earliest explicit references to John's Revelation appear to be in Chapter 34 of Clement's First Letter (late first century CE) and in Chapter 3 of the longer version of Ignatius' Letter to the Smyrnaens (early second century ?), in the Fragments of Papias (60 - 140 CE), and in Chapter 81 of Justin Martyr's (105 - 165 CE) Dialogue with Trypho. See also G. Mussies, The Morphology of Koine Greek as Used in the Apocalypse of St. John: A Study in Bilingualism (SNT 37; Leiden, Brill: 1971), pages 37-38.

Best regards,
Greg Stafford
CWJ Forum Moderator