Revelation. Gordon D. Fee

3. The phrase “I know your deeds” will recur in the final four letters as well; this is altered only in the letters to Smyrna (“I know your afflictions and your poverty”) and to Pergamum (“I know where you live”).

4. On this matter see esp. John 14–17 and all of 1 and 2 John.

5. This is the first of 17 occurrences of this verb in the book, which occurs elsewhere in the NT only 11 other times (6 in 1 John, one of the many evidences of the Johannine character of the Apocalypse).

6. Which reads, “on each side of the river stood the tree of life.”

7. Polycarp himself was martyred for his faith ca. 155 CE.

8. In John’s Greek there is no new sentence here; it simply reads, “I know your afflictions and poverty—but you are rich—and the slander from the so-called Jews . . .”

9. This is the first of 17 occurrences of this name for the devil; see further 2:13, 24; 3:9; 12:9 (where he is further identified as “the ancient serpent called the devil”); 20:2 and 7. The name occurs elsewhere in the NT only in Acts 5:3 and 26:18. The term is a transliteration into Greek of the Hebrew word that occurs in Job 1:6–8, 12; 2:1–7, and Zech 3:1–2.

10. Because of its location on a very high butte, there were no roads or highways going through, and thus in and out of, Pergamum. It was reached only by a long encircling road that went to the city, and nowhere else. Thus to live in Pergamum as a Christian meant to be reminded constantly of its thoroughly pagan culture.

11. This is the first instance in Christian literature where the Greek word for “witness” (martyr) refers to one whose witness led to death. In time this kind of witness caused the Greek word, as a borrowed word, to refer in Christian circles to that special kind of witness (unto death) that lies behind its present meaning in English.

12. Psalm 2:9

13. On this matter cf. the preceding letter.

14. One must say “hear” at this point because the majority of the recipients of this document will have it read to them, in a culture where only about 15–20 percent could read or write. Indeed, the presupposition lying behind all the NT documents is that the recipients will have it read aloud to them in community, vis-à-vis the “silent reading” common to our culture.

15. The urgency of this matter for John reemerges in 9:20–21, where those upon whom God’s final wrath will fall, among other things, “did not repent of the works of their hands, nor stop worshiping demons and idols [in that order!] that cannot see or hear or walk; nor did they repent of their sexual immorality.”

16. Or messenger; also in verses 7 and 14.

17. That is, the sevenfold Spirit.

18. Which Pliny, some forty years later, called “the greatest disaster in human memory.”

19. It is of some interest that the original NIV translators chose to make a paragraph break at v. 4, on the basis of the contrast with vv. 1b–3, rather than at the natural stylistic breaking point, the commendation of the “victorious.”

20. See n. 3 above for the designation, “I know your deeds.”