Patmos

Revelation 1:9. “I was in the island called Patmos … for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.” KJV

Patmos

Many interpreters accept the statement of Zondervan’s Pictorial Bible Dictionary which says: “Patmos was the site of a penal colony, where political prisoners were condemned to hard labor in the mines.” (p. 721.)

However, there is some room for disagreement with this statement.

Leonard Thompson disagrees that Patmos was a penal colony at all. He says:

“The language of [Revelation] 1:9-10 does not give a hint of a suggestion that John was banished, deported, relegated, or imprisoned on Patmos; nor is there any evidence from Roman sources that Patmos was a prison settlement. Nor was it a deserted, barren isle, as is sometimes suggested; it had sufficient population to support a gymnasium two centuries before the Common Era, and around the time of John an inscription refers to the presence of the cult of Artemis.”[1]

The actual KJV text states: “I, John, … was in the isle of Patmos for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Thompson’s grammatical analysis of this passage finds that John and his fellow Christians shared the life of Christ, not necessarily His persecution, and that they were suffering, with Christ, the necessary hardships in order to preach the Gospel on the isle of Patmos.

Dating the Writing of Revelation

Thompson, however, accepts the date of the writing as being in Domitian’s reign, ( 96 AD), although he shows that there is no evidence of widespread persecution under Domitian (ibid., 153). So this does not prove that the writing was in Domitian’s reign.

[1] Thompson, Analysis of Tribulation, 150, citing Saffrey, H.D. “Relire L’Apocalypse à Patmos”. RB 82:393-407.

This lesson is an edited excerpt from my book, Revelation in Context, available locally at the Living Word Bookstore in Shawnee, Oklahoma or www.Amazon.com, or www.XulonPress.com.
Free downloads are also available at www.revelationincontext.sermon.net.