Date of Revelation

FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III.

First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian: “The last few months of Domitian’s life were a veritable reign of

terror, in which many of the noblest Romans were sacrificed.
Among them were two near kinsmen of Domitian himself, Flavius
Clemens and DomitUla. Their Christianity was evidently brought
against them, though it is more probable that this was a mere
pretext. But we cannot doubt that other Christians perished too,
perhaps many others, whether by the putting in force of a dormant
edict of Nero’s, if the edict implied in Pliny’s letter was his, or by a
new edict, or without an edict under comprehensive laws. Yet there
is nothing in the accounts which suggests anything like a general
persecution of Christians, even at Eome : it would rather seem that
Christians of wealth or station were mainly, if not wholly, struck
at. And further, the two accounts of Tertullian and Hegesippus
leave it difficult to doubt that Domitian himself stopped the
persecution. Beyond [the mention by Hegesippus of the arrest of
Jude’s grandsons and] the vague statement of the late Orosius,
there is not a particle of evidence for persecution beyond Rome, and
there is nothing in external events as far as they are known to lead
either to that or to any great disturbance of society. The special
features that seem to fit St John are not really distinctive. What
is told of banishment by Domitian would suit the case of St John
only if he was banished from Rome, a possibility certainly not to
be discarded, considering some of the legends, when our knowledge
is so small; but still only one alternative” (xxiv).

By contrast, the era of Nero fits Revelation well. Hort offers two main arguments. First, “The whole language about Rome and the empire, Babylon
and the Beast, fits the last days of Nero and the time immediately
following, and does not fit the short local reign of terror under
Domitian. Nero affected the imagination of the world as Domitian,
as far as we know, never did” (xxvi).

Second, “The book breathes the atmosphere of a time of wild commotion.
To Jews and to Christians such a time might seem to have
in part begun from the breaking out of the Jewish war in the
summer of 66. Two summers later Nero committed suicide, and
then followed more than a year of utter confusion till the accession
of Vespasian, and one long year more brings us to the Fall of
Jerusalem. To the whole Roman world the year of confusion, if
not the early months of Vespasian’s reign, must have seemed wholly
a time of weltering chaos. For nearly a century the empire had seemed to bestow on civilised mankind at least a settled peace,
whatever else it might take away. The order of the empire was
the strongest and stablest thing presented to the minds and imaginations
of men. But now at last it had become suddenly broken
up, and the earth seemed to reel beneath men’s feet. Under
Vespasian, however, the old stability seemed to return : it lasted on
practically for above a century more. Nothing at all corresponding
to the tumultuous days after Nero is known in Domitian’s reign, or
the time which followed it. Domitian’s proscriptions of Roman nobles,
and Koman philosophers, and Roman Christians, were not connected
with any general upheaval of society. It is only in the anarchy of
the earlier time that we can recognise a state of things that will
account for the tone of the Apocalypse” (xxvi-xxvii).