Revelation 22:7-21

¹ sn These lines are parenthetical, forming an aside to the narrative. The speaker here is the Lord Jesus Christ himself rather than the narrator.

² tn Or “I am John, the one who heard and saw these things.”

³ tn The pronoun “them” is not in the Greek text, but is implied. Direct objects were frequently omitted in Greek when clear from the context.

⁴ tn Grk “I fell down and worshiped at the feet.” BDAG 815 s.v. πίπτω 1.b.α.ב. has “fall down, throw oneself to the ground as a sign of devotion or humility, before high-ranking persons or divine beings.”

⁵ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “but” to indicate the contrast present here.

⁶ tn On the elliptical expression ὅρα μή ({ora mh) BDAG 720 s.v. ὁράω B.2 states: “Elliptically…ὅρα μή (sc. ποιήσῃς) watch out! don’t do that! Rv 19:10; 22:9.”

⁷ tn Grk “fellow slave.” Though σύνδουλος (sundoulos) is here translated “fellow servant,” the word does not bear the connotation of a free individual serving another. See the note on the word “servants” in 1:1.

⁸ tn Grk “keep” (an idiom for obedience).

⁹ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence of events within the vision.

¹⁰ tn Grk “must do evil still.”

¹¹ tn For this translation see L&N 88.258; the term refers to living in moral filth.

¹² tn Grk “filthy, and the.” This is a continuation of the previous sentence in Greek, but because of the length and complexity of the construction a new sentence was started in the translation.

¹³ tn The Greek term may be translated either “pay” or “pay back” and has something of a double meaning here. However, because of the mention of “wages” (“reward,” another wordplay with two meanings) in the previous clause, the translation “pay” for ἀποδοῦναι (apodounai) was used here.

¹⁴ sn These lines are parenthetical, forming an aside to the narrative. The speaker here is the Lord Jesus Christ himself rather than the narrator.

¹⁵ tn Grk “so that there will be to them authority over the tree of life.”

¹⁶ tn On the term φάρμακοι (farmakoi) see L&N 53.101.

¹⁷ tn Or “lying,” “deceit.”

¹⁸ tn On this expression BDAG 892 s.v. πρωϊνός states, “early, belonging to the morning ὁ ἀστὴρ ὁ πρ. the morning star, Venus Rv 2:28; 22:16.”

¹⁹ tn Grk “written.”

²⁰ tc The Textus Receptus, on which the KJV rests, reads “the book” of life (ἀπὸ βίβλου, apo biblou) instead of “the tree” of life. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the NT he had access to no Greek mss for the last six verses of Revelation. So he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek at this point. As a result he created seventeen textual variants which were not in any Greek mss. The most notorious of these is this reading. It is thus decidedly inauthentic, while “the tree” of life, found in the best and virtually all Greek mss, is clearly authentic. The confusion was most likely due to an intra-Latin switch: The form of the word for “tree” in Latin in this passage is ligno; the word for “book” is libro. The two-letter difference accounts for an accidental alteration in some Latin mss; that “book of life” as well as “tree of life” is a common expression in the Apocalypse probably accounts for why this was not noticed by Erasmus or the KJV translators. (This textual problem is not discussed in NA²⁷.)

²¹ tc Most mss (א Ï) read “amen” (ἀμήν, amhn) after “all” (πάντων, pantwn). It is, however, not found in other important mss (A 1006 1841 pc). It is easier to account for its addition than its omission from the text if original. Such a conclusion is routinely added by scribes to NT books because a few of these books originally had such an ending (cf. Rom 16:27; Gal 6:18; Jude 25). A majority of Greek witnesses have the concluding ἀμήν in every NT book except Acts, James, and 3 John (and even in these books, ἀμήν is found in some witnesses). It is thus a predictable variant.