揭开世界末日的神秘面纱

Sir Anthony Kenny is a leading expert in stylometry, which analyses writing technique.

"The things that are most characteristic of authors are not special words that are their favourites. But the frequency with which they use very common words." Two of these common words examined by Sir Anthony were ‘de'-a word similar to ‘but' and ‘kai' meaning ‘and'.

"The word ‘and' is twice as frequent in the Book of Revelation as it is in any other book of the New Testament. Whereas the Gospel of John was not particularly fond of ‘and' and its use is less than average." "On the other hand, the Greek word ‘de' which is very frequent in any other Greek I've ever met, occurs only 7 times in the whole of the Book of Revelation."

Sir Anthony carried out 99 similar tests on Revelation and John's Gospel. His results was conclusive. "I could then by using a simple statistical technique, put together these 99 tests into a particular way of discriminating between texts, and it was at the outcome of that , that I saw that the 4th Gospel and the Book of Revelation were right apart"

"I think that it's extremely unlike that the 2 books were written by the same author." So the case for John the Disciple writing the Book of Revelation doesn't seem a strong one.

Greg Carey, an expert in the meaning of Revelation believes there are clues in the text that can point us to the true author. "John addresses his audience in such a direct way. He says:' I, John, your brother'"."As if he's someone who knows them and whom they all recognize."
The Book of Revelation begins with a series of seven letters to Churches that are located in what we call Asia Minor or south-western Turkey.

Each letter addresses a single Church, congratulates it for its virtues or admonishes it for its faults. So that one assumes that John knew these Churches and had been present among them. And there's a further indication that John was writing to a congregation.

John's Apocalypse-which means "revelation", describes colorful visions of angels and monsters. The letter, likely to have been dictated to a scribe, is clearly no routine correspondence to a Christian church. John has something important to say, and he may be using his audience's imagination to help get his point across.

"It's important to remember that the Book of Revelation was written to be heard. John blesses those who hear the words of the prophecy, as well as the one who reads it, presumably aloud to an audience."

"In other words, the book was written to have an effect upon people who won't studying it like we read books today, but were experiencing it through their imaginations, much as modern audiences listen to radio programmes."