Some dissertations seem overblown, but this one, supervised by Matthew Black at St. Andrew’s, is refreshingly terse.
Thompson’s point of departure is the oddity, long noted, of the writing style of Revelation. Scholars before him had attributed much of this to Semitic influence. Thompson reviews and gathers their suggestions and extends them with his systematic investigation. For evidence, he looks at all available manuscripts of Revelation, rather than, as some scholars had, the standard critical edition or a single uncial manuscript, the Alexandrine. His decision to use an eclectic approach was based on the sensible consideration that copyists would likely tend to smooth out wording awkward in Greek. His investigation concluded that no one manuscript or family of manuscripts preserved more Semitized readings than others. Not even relative antiquity makes a manuscript more likely to witness such a reading.
I was fascinated by Thompson’s consideration of possible Hebrew meanings expressed by Greek verbs. For example, the Greek verb for “to marvel” is used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for a verb that has a secondary sense of “to be devastated” or “to be desolate.” Although the Greek verb doesn’t usually have this meaning, it appears to fit passages in Revelation that use this verb.
Thompson’s primary consideration was a possible Semitic influence on verbal syntax and clauses in Revelation. Here he builds on observations by R. H. Charles and other previous scholars but goes beyond them. I was impressed, however, at his caution in not pressing the evidence further than is warranted to prove a thesis.
It’s clear to anyone reading the New Testament in Greek that the text of Revelation is different. It always struck me as unskilled, but this dissertation has forced me to revise my impression. While it’s still clear that its author does not write polished Greek, most of the oddity of the text, Thompson demonstrates, can be attributed to his familiarity with the Hebrew scriptures. Greek is his second language, and he still thinks in the language of the Hebrew prophets (language that was archaic in his time; Aramaic being the commonly spoken language; even the Hebrew of the Mishna differs from that of the Hebrew Bible). Another interesting way this is reflected is that the author uses verbs not per Greek tenses (past-present-future) but in a way that reflects Hebrew verbal aspects.
Thompson even suggests that the use of “Biblical Greek” was a conscious choice on the part of the author: “Perhaps the necessity of expressing sacred themes in a gentile tongue was rendered less distasteful so long as it preserved the tenses and other essential syntactical features of the sacred language?” (p. 108). This accords so well with the strict separationist stance of the Seer John that it’s worth considering
The presence of Semitisms is not the same as saying that Revelation was originally written in a Semitic language and was translated into Greek, which Thompson concludes is not the case.
One other result of his investigation interested me for its possible bearing on the composition history of Revelation. Many scholars have suggested it was written over time and perhaps incorporated source documents. Thompson’s observation that chapters 11 and 12 (often suggested as earlier compositions) have a concentration of Semitisms, while the letters to the seven churches (chapters two and three) are nearly free of these (consistent with the possibility that these were composed last, as a cover letter accompanying a document might be).
In his conclusion, Thompson claims that the results of an approach such as his have a bearing on translation and exegesis. Unfortunately, I’m not informed enough on the scholarship on Revelation in the nearly four decades since this book appeared to say whether this has come about, but I certainly hope it’s the case. ( )