The Book of Revelation and its Eastern Commentators: Making the New Testament in the Early Christian World by Thomas Schmidt (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• The Book of Revelation and its Eastern Commentators: Making the New Testament in the Early Christian World by Thomas Schmidt
• Martina Vercesi

Thomas Schmidt
The Book of Revelation and its Eastern Commentators: Making the New Testament in the Early Christian World
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021
Pp. viii + 246. $99.99.

Schmidt opens his book with a clear, yet challenging statement: he wants to "examine the formation of the New Testament as a Greco-Roman 'testament'" (1). While scholarly research has focused mostly on the origin and development of the canon (especially during the earliest phases of Christianity), Schmidt argues that nobody has taken into consideration the New Testament collection from the point of view of the validity of testaments.

Schmidt begins his exploration with his choice of source to test his theory, the book of Revelation. This work is the most suitable for this analysis because of its role in giving the final seal of approval to the New Testament. Moreover, Revelation had a troubled journey and late acceptance into the New Testament corpus; the debate around the possibility of including Revelation in the canon continued in the manuscript tradition containing the commentaries. Just as Greco-Roman testaments need validation from authorities (the jurists), Revelation needs the same; in this case, church authorities are needed, and, among those, Schmidt identified that commentaries on Revelation have exerted a significant influence on this process, showing parallels "quite similar to those of the Greco-Roman jurists in order to explain why Revelation should be considered a valid member of their New Testament corpus" (5).

After explanations of the key terms (text, commentary, and testament) and a description of the methodology employed, Schmidt introduces the commentaries he will use for this analysis and briefly outlines the scheme of the book, which is organized in three parts according to the testamentary standard derived from Origen's hermeneutical approach to scripture. Origen represents "the first Christian exegete to synthesize commentarial tradition with various juristic expectations of testaments" (32). The three testamentary standards taken into consideration are consistency, integrity, and profundity. Each of the chapters is dedicated to one of them and first includes a brief history of the use of the selected standard in the Greco-Roman world. Then Schmidt closely examines a series of examples found in the commentaries (considering all those written in the East before the fourteenth century), [End Page 133] where Christian authors provide their reasoning about the application of a certain testamentary standard to the book of Revelation.

Chapter One focuses on the testamentary standard of consistency, which requires that there are no impossible, irrational, or contradictory statements to validate testaments. Regarding the Bible, this principle argues that both Old and New Testaments "should be consistent with [themselves], with obvious facts, and with other similarly testamented works" (38–39). Offering a wide range of examples from Greek commentators on Revelation, Schmidt investigates how they interrelate with the standard of consistency when applied to the book of Revelation. First, he focuses on the inconsistencies between Revelation and other writings from the Old and New Testaments, for example, the other Johannine writings. Second, Schmidt concentrates on inconsistencies within the book of Revelation itself, such as the problem of time. Schmidt argues that there are two interpretative strategies employed by commentators to overcome inconsistencies: literal and allegorical exegesis. This method is regularly used throughout all the standards and represents a powerful strategy for explaining the difficult wording and images present in the book of Revelation.

Chapter Two is related to the standard of integrity, according to which the testament should not contain any offense against humans, or gods, and not be immoral or absurd. The three categories through which Schmidt offers his analysis of the application of this standard to Revelation are cultural expectations (i.e., the critique of Rome that emerges especially in Revelation 17–18), moral standards (i.e., the problem of evil), and doctrinal norms (i.e., the woman giving birth in chapter 12, the millennium of chapter 20). As with the standard of consistency, Greek commentators tried to encompass these transgressions with literal and allegorical exegesis.

The final standard analyzed, the object of Chapter Three, is the...