This is a transcript of Bart Ehrman’s answer to the question asked in the Q&A part of his intro lecture for the attendees to NINT 2026.
Jen – Was the Revelation included because it was thought to be written by the Apostle John?
Bart:
That’s what I always used to think until I looked into it, and it turns out it was accepted for a really unusual reason I never would have imagined, and it’s this.
So there were debates about whether John wrote it, whether the Apostle John wrote it or not, and if they didn’t write it, it wasn’t going to be in. But already in the Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, Dionysius of Alexandria, who wrote a treatise quoted by Eusebius, we have it word for word, where he shows that this could not have been written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of John, and he assumed that was John the son of Zebedee.Well, it wasn’t John the son of Zebedee, but there were debates about who wrote the Book of Revelation. Okay, they go way back. But it wasn’t admitted because they finally decided. It’s more like they finally decided because of why it got admitted.
The reason it got admitted, strangely enough, was because of the Christological controversies going on in the fourth century involving the Arian Controversy and the Council of Nicaea and Constantine, where the two sides in the Arian Controversy.
One side, Arius and his people, were arguing, that Christ was a subordinate divine being that God generated at some time in eternity past, and then through Christ he created the world, Christ became a human, he died for the sins of the world, he ascended to God, but he wasn’t equal with God. He was secondary to God. God made him, and so he exalted him, but he’s not equal with God.
The other side said, no, he is fully equal with God. He’s always existed. He never came into existence. He’s of the same substance as the Father.They are completely equal in every way.
The Book of Revelation ended up being useful for that argument in a weird way, because in the Book of Revelation, God says, I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and Christ says, I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. Ah, they’re equal. So Revelation provided ammunition for one of the sides of the argument, and that’s why they let it in.
