In a previous post, I noted how the testimony of John the Seer parallels the testimony of John the Baptist. But there’s more to it. There’s something structural going on.

In that post, part of my evidence was the unusual (though not unique) doubling of martur- words in both John 1:7 and Revelation 1:2. Both John the Baptist and John the Seer “testify to testimony” or “witness to witness.” The structural significance is that both of these figures of witness appear at the beginning of the book, one of the many hints that John and Revelation are written in parallel.

Further, the doubling martur-/martur- appears twice at the end of the gospel of John, first when John insists that he is a witness of the cross who gives true witness (19:35; marturia), and then when the Beloved Disciple claims to be the one who “witnesses” the things he writes and therefore knows that his witness (marturia) is true (John 21:24).  Within John’s gospel, this phrasing links back to the opening prologue; John the Baptist was the first witness, but by the end of the book the Beloved Disciple has taken over that role. There is a transfer of testimony from John to John.

And those closing references to John’s testimony feed into the declaration in Revelation 1:2 that John is the one who testifies the testimony of Jesus.This linkage of the end of John with the beginning of Revelation is a hint that, in addition to the parallel structure of John and Revelation, we may be dealing with a vast two-book chiasm, with the witness of John serving as the hinge.

In any case, if we read John and Revelation sequentially, we would go from “this disciple who witnesses these things . . . and true is his witness” to “John, who witnesses . . . the witness of Jesus Christ, everything that he saw.” (The reference to “sight” in Revelation 1 reaches back to John 19:35, where John claims to have “seen and has testified.”) 

That is a pretty dramatic connection, and suggests the likelihood that John the Seer deliberately introduces himself as the witness who records the Fourth Gospel. It is even plausible to read the identifying clause of Revelation 1:2 as a reference to the gospel itself. The verb (emarturesen) is aorist, somewhat odd if it is a reference to visions that John is about to see. And the phrase “the Word of God and the witness/testimony of Jesus” is a decent summary of the gospel of John. 

Revelation 1:2 is thus stating: This is the John to whom the angel revealed things that must shortly take place, the John who witnessed to the Word of God who became flesh and to the testimony of Jesus in life and death, who witnessed truthfully to everything that he saw - it’s that John, that trustworthy witness, who received and sends on the apocalypse of Jesus.