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Situating those Two Witnesses of Revelation 11

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  “So John [the Evangelist] and Josephus both described two individuals in Jerusalem who were hated, basically invincible for a while, finally killed, and not allowed to be buried”.   Adam Maarschalk     Adam Maarschalk , who has written, from a preterist point of view, some compelling articles on the Book of the Apocalypse, has gone a long way towards identifying the Two Witnesses: The Two Witnesses Killed by the Beast (Revelation 11:3-13) – Pursuing Truth ….   Revelation 11:4   In Revelation 11:4, the two witnesses are identified as “ the two olive trees and the two lampstands standing before the God of the earth .” As many scholars have recognized, this description draws on Zechariah’s “Vision of the Lampstand and Olive Trees”:   “ Now the angel who talked with me came back and wakened me, as a man who is wakened out of sleep. And he said to me, ‘What do you see?’ So I said, ‘I am looking, and there i...
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Domitian emulating Augustus?

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  by Damien F. Mackey     “ In the opening chapter, the author explains how Domitian’s building programs in the Campus Martius and the  Forum Romanum  reflect Domitian’s desire not only to emulate Augustus but also to surpass him ” .   Philip Mathew     Introduction   Was history merely rhyming , in the case of the emperor Domitian’s supposed emulation of (the presumably earlier) Augustus, or was it, rather, repeating ?   Caesar Augustus ( cf. Luke 2:1) must have been a highly significant figure in ancient history to have attracted so many who are considered to have been his emulators - or those characters who have been dubbed ‘a New Augustus’.   But he, despite his importance, is quite poorly understood – at least according to my reconstructions of him. For one, Caesar Augustus was a Seleucid Greek, not a Roman. He was that tyrannical tormentor of the Maccabees, king Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’, rather t...
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