"And let the one who thirsts," he says, "come; let the one who wishes take the water of life freely." And while, he says, the time of my coming has not yet arrived, says the Lord, apply your mouth to the fountain of life, to the practice of virtue.
It has also been said in what precedes that he calls the recompense of virtue, won with sweat and toil, received as a gift, since "the sufferings of the present time are not worthy [to be compared] with the glory that is about to be revealed to us," according to the words of the most wise Paul.
1:2973
μαρτυρῶφησινἐγὼπάντιτῷἀκούοντιτοὺςπαρόνταςλόγους·
經上說：『我向一切聽見這書上豫言之話的人作見證：』
"I testify," he says, "to everyone who hears the words of this [prophecy]:"
That is, I solemnly warn him not to add anything, lest he draw upon himself the plagues described herein; nor to take anything away, lest he be deprived of his portion in the tree of life and in the holy city that has been described:
That which Paul did, saying, "For I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand"—this too he himself now says, the one teaching these things: "I," he says, "am also solemnly testifying, being now already at the very boundaries of the present life," so that his word might not be left in suspicion by anyone.
Would even one of the ordinary people choose to fabricate words as if from God—let alone John, so great a man—seeing that he was about to undergo the common death before long, and to go into the hands of God more manifestly than those who meanwhile are still among the living? "I write these things, then," he says, all but saying to Christ who calls him to his departure, "Yes."
Since he said above that the prophetic Spirit said to him, "and let the one who hears," he says, "say to the Lord, Come," obeying what had been divinely communicated to him, he says, "Amen:"
But how could the grace of Christ our God come upon those who have been publicly banished? Of this grace make us partakers, O Christ, through your goodness alone:
For it is fitting that you be glorified now and always and unto the age. Amen. — Concerning this divine revelation, some say, moving their tongues rashly and ignorantly, that it was not composed by the divinely-inspired John himself, the evangelist and theologian:
But I think this happens not out of ignorance nor of insight, but only out of simplicity—if it is bold to say so—and out of love of life and attachment to earthly things, those who fear the severity and irrefutability of its pronouncements:
For since the divinely-inspired and holy fathers explicitly bear witness to it, who is capable of shutting his eyes to these things, or of ever arriving at such a mind as to think that these matters are not so? For indeed the great Basil, in his treatise Against Eunomius, making his refutation of that man's most godless blasphemies and follies—concerning which the divine theologian also made mention in his fourth oration—in which he set forth both the difficulties and their solutions from the divinely-inspired scriptures regarding the matters disputed concerning the Son, through the New and Old Testament:
"In the beginning was the Word"—and "was" is used not once but four times—and again elsewhere, "he who is of God," and "he who is in the bosom of the Father," and in other places:
If, then, this Apocalypse had been composed by some other John, as the foolish chatter of the many holds, the great Basil too would have written the words from the Apocalypse under the name of its [actual] author:
But having first set forth the words of Moses, then those of the apostle and theologian, just as also those of the apostle Paul, he needed no one else to bear witness to these.
But the great Gregory, surnamed the Theologian, in his defense addressed to the assembly of the one hundred fifty bishops, which they call the Syntacterion, plainly indeed wrote:
And Eusebius, son of Pamphilus, in the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, spoke somewhat as follows: "The affairs concerning the Jews, then, stood thus"; and after other things:
"At this time the tradition holds that the apostle and evangelist John, still lingering in life, was condemned by Domitian, son of Vespasian, to dwell on the island of Patmos on account of his testimony to the divine word."
Indeed, Irenaeus, writing concerning the numeral of the name given for the Antichrist as recorded in the so-called Apocalypse of John, says these very things about John, in these very words, in the fifth book of his Against Heresies:
It should be known that the author of the present book, having provided it for perusal to honored persons who had requested it, and then, since they were slow to return the book, he himself, not having carefully kept some of the draft-sheets but having carelessly discarded them as it happened, when asked again by another for the book, made use for the composition of those draft-sheets that had been preserved, but for those that were lost, expressed the sense, as was fitting, in other words in a few places.
If, then, some slight discrepancy should appear in the wording, it should by no means create hesitation in the readers, since the sense remains the same even amid the brevity of the wording.