Revelation of John... Who wrote it? And when did it become canonical and part of the New Testament?

 Who wrote the Book of Revelation

? When did it become canonical and part of the New Testament?

The Orthodox sources say that the author is John the son of Zebedee, contrary to the rest of the scholarly sources that we will mention, which deny its attribution to John, the disciple of Christ.
All sources say that the time of its writing is 95 AD, that is, about 65 years after Christ!!!
That is, the church remained without the Book of Revelation for 65 years
. After it was written, of course, it did not spread as quickly as books do in our time.
In addition, it was not accepted, and many of the church fathers did not recognize its inspiration and canonicality, so it was not included in the list of books of the New Testament until the letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 397 AD, where he listed 27 books, which is the current list of books in the New Testament.
However, he faced opposition in terms of including the Book of Revelation and some other books.
We will review the canonical nature of the Book of Revelation, who wrote it, and the problems that faced its addition to the list of books of the New Testament.



Bruce Metzger - The New Testament Canon - Chapter One.
During the Middle Ages questions were rarely raised as to the number and identity of the books that constituted the New Testament canon. Even during the Renaissance and Reformation, despite occasional discussions (such as those of Erasmus and Cajetan) about the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, several official letters, and the Book of Revelation, no one dared to seriously dispute their authority. Although Luther considered four of the New Testament books (Hebrews, the Epistle of James, the Epistle of Jude, and the Revelation) to be inferior to the others, neither he nor his followers dared to omit them from his translation.


Bruce Metzger – The New Testament Canon – Chapter 1.
Shortly after the publication of Simon’s Investigation, the prominent Protestant historian Jacques Basnage de Beauval (1653–1723) devoted a chapter to the canon in his History of the Church from Jesus Christ to the Present Time. For the first three centuries there was no decision as to the limits of the New Testament canon, but each local church was free to choose or reject individual books; This freedom was most evident among the Eastern churches in rejecting the Apocalypse of John.

Bruce Metzger – The New Testament Canon – Chapter 1.
On the one hand, Semler declares that the Word of God and the Bible are not identical, since the Bible contains books such as Ruth, Esther, the Song of Songs, and the Revelation of John, which were important only in their own times but which, he says, cannot contribute to the “moral improvement” of people today. Thus, not all parts of the Bible can in any way be inspired, nor can Christians accept them as authoritative.

Bruce Metzger – The New Testament Canon – Chapter 1
After Alexander’s death, his son Joseph Addison Alexander (1809–1860) became professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary and continued his interest in the New Testament canon. In his lecture notes published posthumously, he focused on the seven New Testament books whose canonicity was disputed in the early church – Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. Bruce Metzger
– The New Testament Canon – Chapter 8
In the absence of any official list of the canonical writings of the New Testament, Eusebius finds it easier to count the votes of his witnesses, and in this way he classifies all the apostolic or supposedly apostolic writings into three classes:
(1) those whose authority and authenticity were agreed upon by all the churches and all the authors he consulted;
(2) those whose rejection was agreed upon by the witnesses; and
(3) an intermediate class in which the votes were divided (see Appendix IV. 3).

The books of the first class he calls homologous, that is, books that were universally recognized. They are twenty-two in number: the “sacred quartet” of the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, and 1 John. “In addition to these,” he continues, “we must place, if it seems right, the Apocalypse of John, concerning which we will present the different opinions in due course.” Despite the last sentence, Eusebius concludes this list with the words “These belong to the recognized books.”
The books falling into the third category (the intermediate class) are called by Eusebius "antilegomena," that is, "books disputed, but familiar to most people in the church." In this category he mentions the Epistles of James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.
The books falling into the category of rejected books, which Eusebius calls "illegal" or "spurious," include the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, the so-called Teachings of the Apostles, and the Gospel according to the Hebrews. To these he adds, inconsistently, the Apocalypse of John, "if it seems appropriate, which some reject, as I have said, and others consider among the recognized books."
Bruce Metzger - The New Testament Canon - Chapter 9
The Eastern Church, as Eusebius notes about 325 AD, was then in great doubt as to the authority of most of the Catholic Epistles and also of the Apocalypse of John....
It is worth noting that the Book of Revelation is not included as a book of the New Testament. This was the state of things in Jerusalem by the middle of the fourth century.
.....
The thirty-ninth Epistle of the Festival of 367 is of special value, as it contains a list of the canonical (canonical) books of the Old and New Testaments. In the case of the Old Testament, Athanasius excluded the canonical books, and allowed them only as devotional reading.
He states that the twenty-seven books of the present New Testament are the only canonical books; they stand in the sequence of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the seven Catholic Epistles, the Pauline Epistles (with Hebrews being included between 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy), and ending with the Apocalypse of John.

The distinguished theologian and contemporary of Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 389), towards the end of his life drew up a catalogue of the biblical books in verse. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, he agrees with Athanasius, but when it comes to the New Testament, he differs in placing the Catholic Epistles after the Pauline Epistles, and, more importantly, in omitting the Apocalypse. Then he declares, “[In these] you have everything. And if there is anything outside these books, it is not among the original [books]. Although Gregory excludes the Book of Revelation from the canon, he knows of its existence, and on rare occasions in his other works quotes from it.
Another list of the books of the Bible, dating from about the same time, is included in a poem generally attributed to Amphilochius (d. after 394), bishop of Iconium in Lycaonia.
The poem, entitled Iambics for Seleucus, and sometimes found among the poems of Gregory of Nazianzus, instructs Seleucus on how to pursue a life of study and virtue. The author urges him to apply himself more to the Bible than to any other writings. Amphilius adds a suggestion to this advice, a complete list of the books of the Bible.
In listing the books of the New Testament, Amphilius mentions some of the earlier controversy over Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation. In fact, he not only relates the doubts of others regarding these books, but also seems to reject 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and almost certainly rejects Revelation.

....
Epiphanius concludes his list by naming the Apocalypse of John as part of Scripture, in this respect agreeing with Athanasius. At the same time, however, his list presents a rather curious anomaly by including among the sacred books, after the Apocalypse, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Sirach (i.e., Ecclesiastes).
John Chrysostom (347-407) was,
according to Swiss, the first writer to give the Bible its present name, the Bible. Among the approximately 11,000 quotations Chrysostom makes from the New Testament, according to Baur, there is not a single one from 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, or the Apocalypse. In other words, his New Testament canon appears to be the same as the Peshitta, the Syriac version current in Antioch in his day (see below, Canon in Syria)...
The last writer of the Antioch school to be mentioned here is Theodoret (c. 393-466). After he was consecrated in 423 as bishop of the small town of Cyrus (Cyrrhus)....
As for the canon of the New Testament, it is evident that it agreed with Chrysostom, that is, it did not use the small Catholic Epistles or the Book of Revelation.
...
Thus, as we have seen, the Council of Carthage and Athanasius recognized the small Catholic Epistles and the Book of Revelation, while the Council of Laodicea and the 85th Apostolic Canon omitted them.
The oldest canon in the Eastern Syrian churches consisted of "the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, and the Book of Acts." That is, instead of the four separate Gospels, the Diatesseron was used, and the Catholic Epistles and the Book of Revelation were absent.

The four shorter Catholic Epistles (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude) and Revelation are absent from the Syriac version of the Peshitta, and the Syrian canon of the New Testament thus contains twenty-two books.
Thus, about the middle of the sixth century, the Nestorian theologian, Paulus, the distinguished teacher of Nisibis, at that time a center of Eastern theological learning, stated in a series of lectures delivered at Constantinople that the books of absolute authority were the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the fourteen Epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, and 1 John. He declared that the least authoritative of them were James, 2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John, and the Apocalypse.


(c) As late as 1170 AD, the scribe of the Monastery of Mar Saliba in Edessa Sahda wrote a copy of the Syriac Harkala New Testament containing 1 and 2 Clement, not at the end of the New Testament as in the fifth-century Greek manuscript Alexandrinus, but within the body of the manuscript, between Jude and Romans. The manuscript presents the books as follows:
(1) the four Gospels, followed by the Passion History compiled by the four Evangelists;
(2) the Acts of the Apostles and the seven Catholic Epistles, followed by Clement's two letters to the Corinthians; and (3) the Pauline Epistles, including Hebrews, which survives last (Revelation is missing).
By the fifth century at the latest, the Armenians had a translation of Revelation, not as a component of the New Testament, but as part of the apocryphal Acts of John. It was only at the end of the twelfth century that Nerses Lampron, Archbishop of Tarsus (d. 1198), prepared a new Armenian translation of the Apocalypse, and later arranged for the Armenian Church Synod held in Constantinople to accept it as a New Testament Scripture.
The Apocalypse had to wait until the tenth century to be translated into Georgian. The translator was Saint Euthymius, who, in addition to translating the Liturgy and Canon Acts, turned his attention to the revision and completion of the Georgian New Testament. His work on the Apocalypse must have been completed sometime before 987 AD, the date of the earliest known Georgian manuscript of the Apocalypse.

Bart Ehrman - New Testament - Chapter 30 - Box 30 - 3
Even the Book of Revelation has many differences between each surviving manuscript, so much so that there are places where it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what the author originally wrote.
One of the paradoxes of the New Testament is that the Fourth Gospel, which does not claim to have been written by someone named John, is called John, while the Book of Revelation, which claims to have been written by someone named John, is not called by that name. In any case, it can be said without reservation that whoever wrote the Gospel did not write this book either. For one thing, the theological assertions are quite distinct.


More importantly, as even early Christian philologists have acknowledged, the writing styles of these two books are quite different. Detailed studies have shown that the author of Revelation was educated primarily in a Semitic language, probably Aramaic, and knew Greek as a second language. His Greek is sometimes clumsy, sometimes ungrammatical. This is not at all the case with the Gospel of John, which was written in a completely different style and thus by a different author (Box 30-2).
Bart Ehrman - New Testament - Chapter 30 - Box 30.5
Unlike most other Revelations, it is not pseudonymous: it was written by a Christian prophet named John. But this was not John, the son of Zebedee.