Was the Apocalypse written in the 90s AD or in the 60s AD, and how do you defend the later date?
A viewer, who was under the impression the Apocalypse was written in the 60s AD, asks Robert to defend his position that it was written in the 90s.
Answer
Get the commentary I just finished on the Apocalypse, which is volume four of the Douay-Rheims commentary series. In the Apocalypse portion I have a whole section, about ten pages, on why the Apocalypse was written in 95 or 96 AD and not in the 60s. I would not even start the Apocalypse commentary until we got it clear when John wrote it. He wrote his Epistles and his Gospel in the 80s, not the 60s, and then finally his last book was the Apocalypse, when he was banished to the island of Patmos, and there he wrote it. There are a lot of people who try to make Israel or the Jews the focus of the Apocalypse; they are not, by any stretch of the imagination. The Apocalypse is about the Church from the first coming of Christ to the second coming of Christ, and if the Jews are mixed in there, so be it, but it is not about the Jews. This is what you get from the Protestant dispensationalists and sometimes the historic premillennialists: a focus on the Jews, and that is where they want to get this 60 AD, or 68 or 69, anything before AD 70, because that is when the Jews are destroyed by the Romans, so they can make the Apocalypse look like a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It is not going to fit. And we have overwhelming patristic testimony that John wrote it in the 90s.