The Language of Empire: Why Revelation Spoke Greek to a Roman World

Picture a revolutionary manifesto. The kind meant to tear down the most powerful empire on earth. Now picture that same manifesto written in the dominant language of the world it was written to dismantle — the language of its philosophers, its trade routes, its public squares, its imperial proclamations.

You would probably think the author had lost the plot.

And yet that is exactly what the Book of Revelation is — though not primarily a political document. The book announces itself from its very first line: “The revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Revelation 1:1) Rome is in the room. But Jesus is the subject.

John — a Jewish man exiled on a volcanic rock in the Aegean Sea, whose entire mental architecture was built from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah — sat down to write the most subversive announcement in human history: that a crucified Jewish carpenter was the true ruler of the kings of the earth, and that every empire demanding the worship belonging to God alone was already finished. (Revelation 1:5) And he wrote every word of it in Greek. The language of the philosophers. The language of the trade guilds. The language of the imperial proclamations posted in the public squares of every city his letter would visit.

He picked up the world’s own tongue and used it to announce a different King.

That choice — one man, one language, one letter — turns out to carry more weight than it first appears. Because once you see what John was doing with the language, you cannot read Revelation the same way again.

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How One Man Accidentally Conquered the World — And Then Died Before He Could Enjoy It#

To understand what Greek meant in John’s world, you have to go back three and a half centuries before Revelation was written — to a young Macedonian king who conquered the known world before he turned thirty-three and then died before he could figure out what to do with it.

Alexander the Great did not just want territory. He wanted transformation. His conquests accelerated the spread of Greek language and culture across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East in ways that outlasted his empire by centuries. Every city he established became a center of Greek civic life — built around a gymnasium, a theater, a library, a school. Now, when you hear gymnasium, do not picture treadmills and squeaky floors. The ancient Greek gymnasium was something else entirely — part prep school, part country club, part ideological training center. It was where the youth learned Greek literature, Greek philosophy, Greek civic duty, and most importantly, the Greek language itself. It was the gateway to everything.

Within a generation, ambitious families from Persia to Palestine were raising their children bilingual, because Greek was the language that opened doors. Not because anyone particularly loved Alexander. Just because the alternative was economic invisibility.

And then, right on schedule, God sent His Son. “When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.” (Galatians 4:4) The timing was not accidental. The linguistic infrastructure Alexander had set in motion centuries earlier was precisely in place when the gospel needed to travel.

Alexander died in 323 BC. His empire fractured into competing kingdoms almost immediately — his generals carved it up like a disputed inheritance before the body was cold. But the language outlasted the man. By the time Rome absorbed those kingdoms — roughly between 200 and 30 BC — Greek culture was so deeply embedded in the eastern Mediterranean that Rome faced a choice: rip it out and replace it with Latin, or adopt it.

They adopted it. Enthusiastically. Almost embarrassingly so.

Educated Romans learned Greek alongside Latin. Roman children studied Greek literature in school. Roman poets and philosophers constantly referenced Greek models. The Roman poet Horace put it perfectly: “Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror.” Rome provided the military muscle. Greece provided the cultural software. Rome conquered Greece with steel, but Greece conquered Rome with prestige.

Think of it like a massive corporate acquisition. An aggressive tech conglomerate buys out a smaller rival. But once the deal closes, the conglomerate’s engineers look at the rival’s back-end infrastructure and realize — quietly, slightly painfully — that it is vastly superior to their own proprietary code. So instead of forcing the acquired company onto the old clunky system, the buyer abandons their own platform and adopts the infrastructure of the company they just swallowed. Rome won the war. Greece won everything else.

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The Ancient World’s USB-C Cable#

The Greek that emerged from all of this was not the elegant, notoriously difficult Greek of Athens’ classical age — the kind with complex mood structures and a dual number system that made non-native speakers want to give up and become farmers. What spread across the empire was something simpler and far more practical. Linguists call it Koine — from the Greek word for common.

Think of Koine as the ancient world’s USB-C cable.

For years, every tech manufacturer had a proprietary charging port. Sony had one. Nokia had another. Apple had its massive 30-pin connector, then the lightning cable. If you forgot your specific charger, you were done. Completely incompatible systems creating friction everywhere. Then the industry finally standardized around USB-C — universal, stripped down to its most functional elements, designed so you can travel anywhere, plug into any device, and it just works.

That is Koine Greek. It developed as the common form of Greek across an increasingly interconnected world, absorbing vocabulary and features from different cultures until it became remarkably effective for communication across regions. It sacrificed literary elegance for maximum utility. It was engineered — by centuries of use, not by a single designer — to travel.

And the evidence for how pervasive it was is not just found in the writings of philosophers and emperors. When archaeologists excavated the ancient trash heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt — actual garbage dumps — they did not find elite philosophical treatises. They found grocery lists. Tax receipts. Letters home from soldiers complaining about their commanders. All of it in Koine Greek. The language of the connected world was not just for the educated class. It was the air everyone breathed.

By 95 AD, when John was writing, Greek had become one of the major shared languages of the eastern Mediterranean, allowing people from different ethnic and regional backgrounds to communicate across enormous distances. A letter written in Greek could be read aloud in a house church in Ephesus, copied and carried to Smyrna, then to Pergamum, then to Thyatira, and understood in every room it entered.

Hebrew could not do that. Aramaic could not do that. If John had written his vision in Hebrew, it would have hit a wall the moment it left the Levant. The USB-C cable would not have fit.

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The Bible Most of John’s Readers Already Had#

Here is something that tends to surprise people: by the time John wrote Revelation, many Christians in Asia Minor had probably never read the Old Testament in Hebrew. Many had likely never heard it in Hebrew. What they knew — what they had grown up with, what they quoted from memory, what they heard read aloud in worship every week — was a Greek translation called the Septuagint.

How did the Hebrew Bible end up in Greek? The same way everything ends up in Greek in this era. Jewish communities scattered across the Greek-speaking world — Alexandria, Antioch, the major cities of the diaspora — had assimilated into the Greek operating system over a few generations. Their children were speaking Greek on the playground. Their grandchildren could not read the sacred texts of their ancestors. Community leaders faced a catastrophic loss of cultural memory and did what any sensible community does when it is about to lose its identity: they translated. A group of Jewish scholars produced a Greek version of the Torah and the Prophets so the community would not simply forget who it was.

The result — the Septuagint — became the Bible of the diaspora. And by the first century, it was enormously important to the early Christian movement. Many New Testament writers quote or echo its Greek wording throughout their letters. When the early Christians’ entire conceptualization of God, covenant, prophecy, and salvation was being formed, it was being formed in Greek.

This matters enormously for how Revelation works.

John does not just quote the Septuagint the way a scholar drops a footnote to prove a technical point. He breathes it. His images, his sentence rhythms, his vocabulary all carry the sound of the Greek Old Testament. And his readers would have heard it — not with their eyes, but with their ears, the way people in an oral culture always heard Scripture. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear.” (Revelation 1:3)

Picture the scene. A house church in Ephesus. The lector unrolls the scroll and begins to read. The room is quiet — artisans, merchants, slaves, freedpeople, all listening. And then, in the middle of this terrifying new vision of a heavenly throne room, the lector reads: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” (Revelation 4:8)

The room tightens.

Because everyone in that room has heard those words before. Not from this scroll. From Isaiah. From years of communal worship, the Septuagint’s throne-room vision carved into their memory — the seraphim crying “Holy, holy, holy” before the same God, in the same posture of overwhelming holiness. (Isaiah 6:3) John is not copying Isaiah word for word. He is doing something more deliberate than that. He is updating the vision. Same God. Same holiness. A much bigger throne room. And the linguistic neural pathways the Septuagint had already carved into their bones over decades of worship made the recognition instant.

Think of it like a movie score. You are sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly the composer drops in two notes — just two — from a theme you have known since childhood. You do not analyze it. You do not think: ah yes, a thematic callback to an earlier motif. Your heart rate just spikes. The familiar sound anchors the new experience before your brain catches up. That is exactly what John was doing. He was using the linguistic architecture the Septuagint had already built inside his readers to make the new vision land as confirmation rather than confusion.

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The Cities John Was Writing To — And Why Language Was a Matter of Survival#

The seven churches named in Revelation 1 were not abstract. They were real congregations in real cities — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — connected by a Roman road that a courier would carry the letter along in sequence. (Revelation 1:11)

Take Ephesus. One of the largest cities in the empire — a massive deepwater port, a financial center, home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And here is a detail that tends to surprise people: the Temple of Artemis was not just a religious center. It functioned as the central bank of the entire region. People stored their wealth there because nobody was going to rob the goddess. The economy, the religion, and the politics of the city were completely inseparable — and all of it ran in Greek.

The Christians living in Ephesus were not isolated monks. They were tent makers, coppersmiths, spice merchants, weavers, slaves, freedpeople — fully embedded in the Greek-speaking commercial and social networks of their city. They conducted their daily business in Greek. Their children were educated in Greek. They thought in Greek.

Writing to them in Hebrew would have been like receiving a letter from your pastor written entirely in ancient Sumerian. Technically meaningful, perhaps, to someone with a very specific academic background. Practically useless to everyone sitting in the room.

And there was a specific pressure tearing these communities apart — one that only makes sense in a Greek-speaking context. Many professions in the Roman world had organized associations — guilds — with patron deities and regular communal meals that included ritual offerings. Ancient Roman life did not separate the secular from the sacred. If your livelihood depended on your professional standing, and your professional gatherings opened with a ritual offering to a patron god or the divine spirit of the emperor, you faced a real choice every time you showed up to work.

Revelation makes this pressure explicit. Later in the book, John describes a system in which “no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.” (Revelation 13:17) Economic participation and religious allegiance were not separate questions. They were the same question.

This is where a group called the Nicolaitans enters the picture. Their precise teaching remains uncertain — Revelation does not give us their full argument. What is clear is that Jesus associates them with compromise involving idolatry and practices incompatible with faithfulness. (Revelation 2:6, 15) Whatever their reasoning, the pressure they were responding to was entirely real: can we follow Jesus and still participate in the economic and social life of this city?

John looks at that question and answers it — in Greek. In the language of the very marketplace creating the pressure. Not by retreating into Hebrew isolationism. Not by telling his readers to go form a commune in the desert. He steps directly onto their linguistic turf and addresses their real-world dilemma in the language of the trade guilds themselves. Paul had already named the principle: “I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some.” (1 Corinthians 9:22) John was living it.

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Something Strange About John’s Greek — And Why It Was Deliberate#

Here is where it gets genuinely fascinating.

If a classically trained Roman aristocrat had picked up John’s scroll, they would have immediately felt something was wrong. Not wrong in content — wrong in grammar. John’s Greek is full of what linguists call Hebraisms — Greek words arranged using Hebrew sentence structures. To an educated Roman ear, it would have sounded like someone thinking in one language and writing in another. Clunky. Primitive. Like nails on a chalkboard for a Greek purist.

For centuries, scholars assumed this was simply incompetence. John was a Galilean, they said. His first language was Aramaic. He was doing his best in a second language and making a mess of it. Uneducated fisherman. Case closed.

Except that explanation falls apart when you look closely at the text. John’s Greek vocabulary is actually remarkably sophisticated. And the grammatical breaks are not random — they follow highly specific patterns. More tellingly, John applies standard Greek grammatical rules correctly in dozens of places throughout Revelation. Which means when he breaks them, he is not making a mistake.

He is making a choice.

Take one specific example. In Revelation 1:4, John greets the churches from God, describing Him as “him who is and who was and who is to come.” Beautiful in English. But in the original Greek, John commits what is, for a classically trained reader, a grammatical car crash. The preposition he uses — apo — normally requires the following words to take the genitive case. That is not a stylistic preference. It is a basic, non-negotiable rule of Greek grammar. John uses apo correctly thirty-five other times in Revelation. He knows the rule. He applies it consistently everywhere else.

Here, he ignores it entirely. He freezes the words in the nominative case and refuses to decline them — and scholars across the spectrum recognize this as deliberate. The most likely explanation is that John is echoing the Septuagint of Exodus 3:14, where God tells Moses: “I am the one who is.” In Hebrew, the divine name — Yahweh — is indeclinable. It does not change. It cannot be modified by grammatical context. By forcing his Greek into that same frozen, unchangeable form, John is embedding a theological statement directly into the grammar itself: this God does not bend to the rules of your language. He does not decline.

It was not a failure of grammar. It was a triumph of theology.

Think of it this way. Imagine someone today sends a company-wide email exposing massive corporate corruption. But instead of writing in standard corporate English, they write the entire thing in the cadence and syntax of the King James Bible. Thou shalt not bear false witness before the shareholders. Wherefore hath the CFO concealed the accounts? You would not read that email and think: this person forgot how to write modern English. You would immediately recognize they were hijacking an authoritative tone — claiming a prophetic mantle through the sheer sound of the words.

That is exactly what John was doing. By writing Greek that sounded like the Septuagint, he was not just writing about the prophets. He was writing like them. When the lector read his scroll aloud in the house church in Ephesus, the jagged Hebraic edges of the Greek hit the ear with the unmistakable resonant authority of ancient Scripture. The grammar itself declared: this is not a pastoral update. This is prophecy.

He bent the empire’s language until it sounded like Yahweh.

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One Word That Carried Two Worlds#

Sometimes the most important thing in a text is a single word.

Throughout Revelation, John uses a Greek word — nikaō — that gets translated in English as overcome or conquer. It appears in the promises to each of the seven churches. To the one who overcomes… It appears in the description of the martyrs: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” (Revelation 2:7; 12:11)

In a modern religious context, overcome sounds almost therapeutic. Overcoming personal temptation. Overcoming a difficult season. Getting through a tough week. Very internal. Very sanitized.

In the first century, nikaō carried the full weight of military conquest and imperial triumph. Picture Vespasian and Titus returning to Rome in 71 AD after destroying Jerusalem and burning the temple to the ground. They rode through the streets in four-horse chariots, flanked by their legions, parading the looted treasure of the temple — including the golden menorah — for the crowds to see. Behind them marched tens of thousands of captive, starving Jewish slaves, to be publicly mocked and eventually executed or sent to the gladiatorial games. The entire city shut down to celebrate. That was what winning looked like. And the coins in everyone’s pockets — stamped with the emperor’s image and his titles — were propaganda billboards declaring the same message every time someone reached into their purse: Rome conquers. Rome is invincible. Resistance is not just futile — it is humiliating.

Now watch what John does.

He does not simply hand the word nikaō to the martyrs and call it a day. He first redefines what conquest itself means — and he does it with one of the most stunning reversals in all of Scripture.

In Revelation 5:5, one of the elders announces: “See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah… has conquered.” The reader braces. A lion. Military power. Strength. A conqueror. The kind of winner Rome would recognize.

John turns to look.

And he sees a Lamb. “A Lamb, looking as though it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.” (Revelation 5:6)

That is the moment everything shifts. The empire defines victory by the sword. Revelation defines victory through the slain Lamb. The one who truly conquered did not do it by crushing his enemies. He did it by laying down his life — and rising.

Picture two victory parades.

Parade One: A Roman general on a four-horse chariot. Weapons gleaming. Loot piled high. Captives dragged in chains behind him. The crowds roaring. Victory demonstrated through domination.

Parade Two: A Lamb — slain, standing — surrounded not by captives but by worshippers. Every nation, tribe, people, and language gathered before the throne, not in chains but in praise. (Revelation 7:9)

Which picture actually defines victory?

Revelation does not ask you to answer that question. It answers it for you.

And then John takes that redefined word — nikaō, now soaked in the blood of the Lamb rather than the blood of the conquered — and hands it to the people Rome is currently executing. He points to the Christian artisan in Pergamum who just lost his guild membership for refusing to burn the incense. He points to the slave in Smyrna being dragged toward the arena. He points to Antipas, a faithful witness put to death by the local authorities. And he says of them: they are the ones who are conquering.

He does not write a long theological treatise explaining why Rome is wrong. He just steals their favorite word for winning, fills it with the Lamb’s definition of victory, and hands it to the people they are currently executing.

Linguistic judo. A judo master does not try to match the brute strength of a charging opponent — that would be suicide. Instead, they use the opponent’s own momentum, their own weight, against them. John takes the massive, unstoppable momentum of the empire’s vocabulary of conquest, grabs hold of it, and flips it entirely upside down.

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The Pattern God Keeps Using#

Pull back far enough and what you see is this: John wrote his confrontation of imperial power in the language the empire had adopted as the mark of civilization. He used the world’s own tools to dismantle the world’s own theology.

And this was not the first time.

Moses was not a Hebrew slave who staged a grassroots rebellion from the mud pits. He was raised in Pharaoh’s own household — educated in Egyptian learning, fluent in Egyptian statecraft, thoroughly formed by the culture of the empire. Acts 7:22 records it plainly: “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” The empire trained him. And it was precisely that formation that equipped him to walk into Pharaoh’s court, speak the language of power fluently, and negotiate the liberation of Israel. The house of bondage had unknowingly prepared the instrument of its own undoing.

Daniel is the same story in a different empire. Taken to Babylon, enrolled in the imperial academy, educated in the language and literature of the Chaldeans. “God gave these four young men knowledge and understanding of every kind of literature and wisdom.” (Daniel 1:17) Babylon trained Daniel. Daniel outlasted Babylon.

Then there are the Roman roads. Rome built the greatest network of paved roads the ancient world had ever seen — primarily to move legions and project imperial power across the provinces. The roads were infrastructure built for domination. And then the early Christians walked on them. Letters from Paul. Missionaries. Copied texts. The gospel moved across the Mediterranean basin with a velocity that simply would not have been possible fifty years earlier — carried on roads built by the empire to maintain its own dominance. The infrastructure of occupation became the infrastructure of liberation.

And then — in a moment so quiet it is easy to miss — it had already happened at the cross itself.

When Pilate nailed the inscription above Jesus on the cross, he wrote it in three languages: Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. (John 19:19–20) Aramaic for the Jewish covenant community. Latin for Roman law and power. Greek for the commerce and culture of the empire. Rome intended it as a mocking title. This is the King of the Jews. But in the three languages of the known world, nailed above the one who would rise three days later, the Roman prefect had unwittingly written the most accurate proclamation in human history — and broadcast it in every language that mattered.

John, sitting on Patmos, was participating in that same ancient pattern. He looked at Koine Greek — the language that had spread across the world through conquest and commerce — and he realized: this is my Roman road.

He did not retreat from the language out of some desire for religious purity. He picked it up, saturated it in the imagery of the Hebrew prophets, and used it for an end the empire never could have imagined.

God does not avoid the tools of the world. He picks them up and uses them for something the world never intended.

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What the Language Carried#

Because Revelation was written in Greek, it could travel. Read in Ephesus one week, copied and carried to Smyrna the next, then to Pergamum, then to Thyatira — understood in every room, by every person in the room, from the educated merchant who owned the house to the illiterate slave sitting in the back.

Because it was written in Greek, it could resonate. The Septuagint rhythms underneath John’s prose landed in the ears of people who had grown up hearing those rhythms as the voice of God. The new vision arrived wearing the sound of the old promises.

Because it was written in Greek, it survived. Scholars compiled the Greek manuscripts. That Greek text was translated into Latin, into German, into early English. Every translation that eventually placed this text into your language today rests on the foundation of John’s choice to write in Koine Greek on a rocky island in 95 AD.

There is something else worth noticing. At Babel, God confused the languages of humanity — one act of imperial hubris scattering the nations into mutual incomprehension. (Genesis 11:1–9) Centuries later, in Revelation 7:9, John sees the result of the gospel’s journey through the world: “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne.” What Babel divided, the Lamb gathers. And the language that carried the message — the common tongue of a fallen empire — became the unlikely instrument of that gathering.

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Did the Message Land?#

The language traveled. But language was never the destination.

John wrote in Greek so the message could be heard. And the message was not ultimately about Greek, or Rome, or even Rome’s downfall. It was about a throne. It was about a Lamb. It was about who truly rules, and what victory actually looks like, and whether the people of God would worship the Lamb when the world around them demanded another allegiance entirely.

The last chapter of Revelation does not close with a military victory. It does not close with Caesar on his knees — though it has plenty to say about that. It closes with an invitation. A single Greek word of welcome, open to anyone who is thirsty.

“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ Let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’ And let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely.” (Revelation 22:17)

It is an invitation to step off the Roman road. To step out of every system that promises security through power, belonging through compromise, and survival through accommodation — and step into a different kind of kingdom entirely. One that does not conquer by crushing. One that wins by the blood of the Lamb and the word of testimony.

The book was written for terrified people in Asia Minor in 95 AD. It was also written, in the logic of the God who inspired it, for everyone who would ever need to hear what it says.

Which means it was written for you. Not for a version of you that has everything figured out. For the version of you sitting with the same question those artisans in Ephesus were sitting with: is the Lamb who already won actually enough for what I am carrying right now?

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Revelation 2:7)

The language traveled. Did the message land?

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Source Notes#

¹ F. W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 52–54; Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 1:58–65.

² Horace, Epistles 2.1.156: “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.” See also Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1:250–255.

³ G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 100–101; David E. Aune, Revelation 1–5, Word Biblical Commentary 52A (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1997), clxvii–clxx.

⁴ A. S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar, eds., Select Papyri, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1:x–xii; Lincoln H. Blumell and Thomas A. Wayment, Christian Oxyrhynchus: Texts, Documents, and Sources (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 1–5.

⁵ Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 29–33; Craig S. Keener, Revelation, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 32–33.

⁶ G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 704; Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 1–5.

⁷ Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting, Biblical Resource Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 35–56; Craig S. Keener, Revelation, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 35–36.

⁸ Hemer, Letters to the Seven Churches, 87–94; Gary M. Burge and Andrew E. Hill, eds., The Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2012), 1588.

⁹ Beale, Book of Revelation, 100–101; Aune, Revelation 1–5, clxvii–clxx.

¹⁰ G. K. Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament in Revelation, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 166 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 324–326; Laurențiu Florentin Moț, “Semitic Influence in the Use of New Testament Greek Prepositions: The Case of the Book of Revelation,” Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics 6 (2017): 53–54; Joshua M. Greever and Douglas Estes, “Tetragrammaton in the New Testament,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

¹¹ Beale, Book of Revelation, 100–101; Stanley E. Porter, Idioms of the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 295–296.

¹² Josephus, Jewish War 7.5.3–6; Beale, Book of Revelation, 225–226.

¹³ Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 69–70; Beale, Book of Revelation, 666–671.

¹⁴ N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 2:1271–1273; Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 1–3.

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