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A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse

Chapter 83: Footnotes
By Sylvester Bliss
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Religion/Spirituality

About This Book

The author presents a concise, non-dogmatic exposition of the Apocalypse that couples a practical primer on prophetic interpretation with a systematic, verse-level commentary. Opening chapters lay out interpretive principles — the grammar of prophecy, scriptural usage of terms, consecutive and discursive forms, and conditional versus unconditional predictions — and argue that scripture should explain scripture. The body applies those rules to symbolic passages, tracing parallel references and offering plain-language explanations and footnotes. The tone is instructional and aimed at classroom study, favoring brevity and common-sense reasoning.

Footnotes

1.
The first Advent was, according to the best-settled chronological data, about four thousand one hundred and twenty years from creation.
2.
See margin of Whiting's Testament. Lord has it, “when he can be ready to sound.”
3.
The constitutional language was, “By the authority of the senate, and consent of the soldiers.”—Gibbon, vol. I., p. 44.
4.
This is given on the authority of the London Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, for 1852, p. 330, which states that the edict will be found in the “Theodosian Code, XVII. to XX.”
5.
“Ubi cogniti fuerint illius hæresis sectatores, ne receptaculum iis quisquam in terra sua præbere præsumat: sed nec in venditione aut emptione aliqua cum iis omnino commercium habeatur.”—Hard., vi. ii. 1597.
6.

The following philological law or canon of criticism is universally admitted, and all dictionaries, grammars, and translations, are formed in accordance with it:

“Every word not specially explained or defined in a particular sense, by any standard writer of any particular age and country, is to be taken and applied in the current or commonly received signification of that country and age in which the writer lived and wrote.”—Campbell.

7.
This possession by demons is similar to the mode by which pretended spirits claim that they communicate through mediums. One of them, purporting to be the spirit of a departed son of Adin Ballou, in answer to the question, by his father, “Can you describe how you are able to write through a medium?” says, “I feel as though I enter into her for the time being, or as if my spirit entered into her. I am disencumbered of my spiritual form, and take hers. More than one spirit can enter the medium at once. The mediums all go into the trance by means of several spirits entering the body at one time.”—Spiritual Telegraph, May 8, 1852.
8.
The word is demon or demons in all the instances referred to.
9.
Necromancy is derived from the Greek words nekros, dead, and mantis, a diviner. The Greek, Necromantia, is defined: “The revealing future events by communication with the dead; necromancy.” And Nekromantis: “One who reveals future events by communication with the dead; a necromancer.”
10.
This is in the Syriac, “Until the fulness of the time of all things.” Irenæus says, “Till the time of the exhibition or disposal of all things;” and Œcumenius, “Till the time of all things does come to an end;” and we have the suffrage of Thesychius and Phavorinus, that “ἀποκατάστασις is τελειωσις, ‘the consummation’ of a thing.”—Whitby.