Epigraphical Commentary on the Book of Revelation

Research into the New Testament has thus far focused primarily on literary sources as contemporary parallels. Although there have been calls for more than a century to also draw on documentary evidence such as papyri, inscriptions, and coins as important resources for contextualizing early Christian literature, this has rarely been done and not comprehensively. The Epigraphical Commentary on the New Testament (ECNT) fills this significant gap, in this project with a focus on the Revelation of John (1:1-8:1). In the course of the project, databases containing inscriptions such as those of the Packard Humanities Institute or the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum are searched for words that appear in Rev 1:1-8:1. The results are grouped according to the different uses of these words in the inscriptions, with local and temporal criteria playing an important role. The closer the epigraphic evidence is to the time and place of the writing of the Book of Revelation i.e., the end of the 1st/beginning of the 2nd century in western Asia Minor the more relevant it is. In addition, epigraphic evidence from the Mediterranean region is also examined, as it can show how widespread the use of a word was. The premise here is that the inscriptions document a significant section of the language usage of the Greco-Roman world of the early imperial period. The evidence found and presented in detail in this way is used to interpret the the Book of Revelation, making it easier to understand what the author of this apocalyptic text meant and how his readers could have understood it at the time of writing. As the previous project on 1 Thessalonians showed, this reveals new insights that open up a range of different interpretations. Sometimes they confirm and supplement established readings, but often they offer innovative insights. The material compiled will be used to produce a monograph that concisely presents the epigraphic evidence and provides a continuous commentary on the text of Rev 1:1-8:1. The inscriptions for the individual words of the New Testament collected in the course of the project will be compiled in a database that will be made available online. The work on the Epigraphical Commentary on the New Testament is being carried out in close cooperation between New Testament exegesis and epigraphic research, so that colleagues from both disciplines are involved in the overall project. Markus Öhler (University of Vienna) and Joseph Verheyden (KU Leuven) represent the field of exegesis, while Riet Van Bremen (University College London) and Andrzej Chankowski (Université de Poitiers) represent the field of epigraphy.