Richard Bauckham Quote
The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God’s activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John’s concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apocalyptic genre as a vehicle of prophecy, as not all Jewish apocalyptists did consistently. So it would be best to call John’s work a prophetic apocalypse or apocalyptic prophecy. With that qualification, it obviously fits the definition of the genre apocalypse quoted above, and there should be no difficulty in recognizing its generic relationship to the Jewish apocalypses, while at the same time acknowledging its continuity with Old Testament prophecy.
The heavenly revelation he receives concerns God’s activity in history to achieve his eschatological purpose for the world. In other words, John’s concerns are exclusively prophetic. He uses the apocalyptic genre as a vehicle of prophecy, as not all Jewish apocalyptists did consistently. So it would be best to call John’s work a prophetic apocalypse or apocalyptic prophecy. With that qualification, it obviously fits the definition of the genre apocalypse quoted above, and there should be no difficulty in recognizing its generic relationship to the Jewish apocalypses, while at the same time acknowledging its continuity with Old Testament prophecy.
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About Richard Bauckham
In 2006, Bauckham published his most widely-read work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, a book that defends the historical reliability of the gospels. Bauckham argues that the synoptic gospels are based "quite closely" on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the Gospel of John is written by an eyewitness. This opposes the view that the four gospels were written later and not via interviews with direct eyewitnesses, but were rather the result of a longer chain of transmission of stories of Jesus filtered through early Christian communities over time.
The book was well-received, earning the 2007 Christianity Today book award in biblical studies and the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2009. Bauckham updated and expanded the book to respond to critics in a second edition, published in 2017.