John ; or, the Apocalypse of the New Testament. By
Philip S. Deaprez. • (Longmans.)—This book is a -" retractatien." The writer was once an interpreter of what we may call the "extreme preterist" school,—that is, he believed that the utterances of the Revelation have a corm- spondenoe with the events of history, but looked for that correspondence within very narrow limits, confining it, in fact, to the period of the destruction of Jerusalem, in which event he saw what the seer of the Apocalypse described as "the coming of the Son of Man." He has now abandoned his theory. His present conviction is "that the Apocalypse is not a prophetic record of literal facts, but a sincere, although visionary, delineation of events which St. John, in common perhaps with many of his countrymen, supposed to be impending ;" he "cannot therefore, again look for secular history in the book, or believe that the Seer of Patmos was infallibly guided in his prognostications." With much that Mr. Desprez says of the method of historical interpretation we heartily agree. He is perfectly justified in saying that "interpreta- tions far more wonderful than the problems they are meant to solve, and expositions of a more marvellous character than the symbols of the sacred text, have made the exegetical history of this book the subject of sharp, but not unmerited, criticism." But this feeling does not prevent us from holding our own view of the meaning of the book,—that it is a setting-forth of the Divine dealings with the world—a view which permits us to believe that it is really a Revelation, such as it cannot be if Mr. Desprez is right, when he holds it to be " a sincere, although visionary, delineation" of what a certain Jew of the first century thought likely to happen. At the same time, we can welcome, as a valuable contribution to the true exegesis of the book, all that Mr. Desprez can tell us about the working of the writer's mind, about his Jewish prepossessions and habits of thought. And, much as we differ from its conclusions, we gladly recognize the learned research and the ingenuity which this volume displays.
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