The Letters to Seven Churches: Updated Edition

Rating:
Summary: History Behind Revelation
Review: At the beginning of the Book of Revelation are "letters" to churches in seven cities of Asia Minor, praising, rebuking and admonishing their congregations and disclosing how Christ views their works.

To the modern reader, these prefatory letters may seem as riddling as the symbol-filled apocalyptic visions that make up the bulk of the book. But the "seven churches" existed in real locales, and Sir William Ramsay shows how the letters addressed to them acutely reflect local circumstances.

Ramsay (1851-1939) was a prominent archeologist specializing in Greek and Roman Asia Minor. He was also a prolific writer on early Church history. "The Letters to the Seven Churches" is a superb synthesis of these areas of expertise. Its first part surveys what can be known of the places, peoples and institutions of late First Century Asia Minor. Ramsay then proceeds to analyze each of the letters, first recounting pertinent aspects of the city's history and geography, then relating those to the biblical text. The connections are always interesting and often illuminating.

Inevitably, speculative elements creep in. Ramsay infers much more about the "Nicolaitans", whom the letters denounce in unrestrained terms, than the evidence seems to warrant, and his statements about the "Flavian persecution", whose very existence is doubted by many scholars, should be read with caution.

Ramsay took the traditionalist side in the scholarly debates concerning the early Church, but this work is not in a controversial vein. Modernists need not fear that perusing it will undermine their faith, and everyone who is interested in what Christianity looked like in its earliest days will learn much from its pages.

Rating:
Summary: History Behind Revelation
Review: At the beginning of the Book of Revelation are "letters" to churches in seven cities of Asia Minor, praising, rebuking and admonishing their congregations and disclosing how Christ views their works.

To the modern reader, these prefatory letters may seem as riddling as the symbol-filled apocalyptic visions that make up the bulk of the book. But the "seven churches" existed in real locales, and Sir William Ramsay shows how the letters addressed to them acutely reflect local circumstances.

Ramsay (1851-1939) was a prominent archeologist specializing in Greek and Roman Asia Minor. He was also a prolific writer on early Church history. "The Letters to the Seven Churches" is a superb synthesis of these areas of expertise. Its first part surveys what can be known of the places, peoples and institutions of late First Century Asia Minor. Ramsay then proceeds to analyze each of the letters, first recounting pertinent aspects of the city's history and geography, then relating those to the biblical text. The connections are always interesting and often illuminating.

Inevitably, speculative elements creep in. Ramsay infers much more about the "Nicolaitans", whom the letters denounce in unrestrained terms, than the evidence seems to warrant, and his statements about the "Flavian persecution", whose very existence is doubted by many scholars, should be read with caution.

Ramsay took the traditionalist side in the scholarly debates concerning the early Church, but this work is not in a controversial vein. Modernists need not fear that perusing it will undermine their faith, and everyone who is interested in what Christianity looked like in its earliest days will learn much from its pages.