Identifier: commentaryonreve0703smit (find matches)
Title: Commentary on the Revelation
Year: 1884 (1880s)
Authors: Smith, Justin Almerin, 1819-1896
Subjects: Bible
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : American Baptist Publication Society
Contributing Library: Princeton Theological Seminary Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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of the ancient one. It has a popu- 46 REVELATION. (Ch. II. 8 And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write;These things saith the first and the last, which wasdead, aud is alive; And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write;These things saith the first and the last, who ^ was a ch. 1: 8,17,18.- lation of one hundred and eighty thousandor one hundred and ninety thousand, three-fourths of them being nominal Christians, in-cluding Greeit, Roman Catholic, and Protestantchurches. The old city is said to date fromabout 1-jOO b. c, having been then foundedby some piratical Greeks. It is on the JEgeanSea, at the bottom of the Hermaean Gulf.— fourteen or fifteen years would have elapsed.What was his age at the time of his death,seems not to be known ; we are only told thathe suffered martyrdom in an extreme age.If we might place his age, then, at one hun-dred, he would be at the date of his conver-sion fourteen years old, and at the time ofJohns exile and the writing of the Apocalypse,
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The angel of the church in Smyrna. Was this angel of the church the martyr Poly-carp? It is a question which cannot beconclusively answered. Polycarp sufferedmartyrdom under Marcus Aurelius, in A. D.1G8. He had then, as he told the proconsulat his trial, been a Christian eighty and sixyears. This would place his conversion inthe year a. d. 82. Between that date and thewriting of the Apocalypse, in a. d. 96 or 97, twenty-eight or twentj-nine. He may, cer-tainly, have lived to an age so great, or evengreater, and may have even as a young man,been the chief pastor at Smyrna, and so theangel through whom this epistle is ad-dressed. But this theory must build upon thetwo suppositions we have named, for neitherof which is there any direct evidence. It istrue that in a. d. 108, when Ignatius visitedSmyrna, Polycarp was the castor there. This Ch. II.) REVELATION. 47 9 I know thy works, aud tribulation, and poverty(but thou art jricli), aud / knuw tlie blxsphtiuy ofthem whicli say tliey are Je

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