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Bible Dictionaries
Patmos
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (Πάτμος)
Patmos, one of the group of islands named the Sporades, lies in that part of the aegean Sea which the Greeks called the Icarian, and is visible on the right as one sails from Samos to Cos. It is a volcanic island, bare and rocky, 10 miles long from N. to S., and 6 miles wide at the northern end. Its hills command a magnificent view of the surrounding sea and islands. At its centre, where it narrows to an isthmus, between the bay of Scala on the E. and that of Merika on the W., are found the remains of an ancient Hellenic town, which prove that the island was once populous; and the name of ‘Palmosa,’ which it bore in the Middle Ages, points to another time of prosperity; but Turkish rule has had its usual blighting effect. To-day ‘the isle’ has 4,000 Greek inhabitants, who are mostly sponge-fishers. The modern town stands on a hilltop, 800 ft. above sea-level, in the southern half of the island. It clusters about the Monastery of St. John-founded by St. Christodulus in a.d. 1088, on the site of an old temple-which has lost most of the treasures of its once valuable library, including the 9th cent. edition of Plato, now in the Bodleian. Monastic piety shows the place where the Revelation was written by St. John, and halfway down the hill is a grotto (τὸ σπήλαιον τῆς Ἀποκαλύψεως) the rocks of which are said to have been cleft by the Divine voice.
More important are the internal indications that the book was written amid the sights and sounds of the infinite sea. It has the word θάλασσα 25 times, and it is full of the clashing of waves. No fitter scene could be found for the composition of the Apocalypse than the traditional one, and, if there were any reason to question the story of the author’s banishment to the island, one would have to say, ‘si non è vero, è ben trovato.’ Nowhere is ‘the voice of many waters’ more musical than in Patmos; nowhere does the rising and setting sun make a more splendid ‘sea of glass mingled with fire’; yet nowhere is the longing more natural that the separating sea-the oceanus dissociabilis of Horace (Od. I. iii. 22)-should be no more.
Small and inhospitable islands were often used as places of banishment (relegatio) in the 1st cent. (Pliny, HN_ IV. xii. 23; Tac. Ann. iii. 68, iv. 30, xv. 71). According to Eusebius (HE_ iii. 18), Jerome (de Vir. Illustr. 9), and others, St. John was exiled to Patmos under Domitian in a.d. 95, and released about 18 months afterwards under Nerva. W. M. Ramsay thinks that, as St. John was not a first-class prisoner, he must have been condemned not only to banishment but to hard labour for life (The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 1904, p. 82 ff.). At any rate, St. John was in Patmos ‘for (διά) the word of God’ (Revelation 1:9). The meaning of the phrase is much disputed, some holding that it expresses the human cause, others the over-ruling Divine purpose, of his exile. He was banished either because of his loyalty to truth already revealed, or for the reception of truth about to be revealed. The former interpretation probably gives the writer’s real meaning, but the latter (preferred by B. Weiss and others) contains a thought well worth expressing. While the authorities of Ephesus, moved perhaps by some mysterious impulse to spare the saint’s life, transported him to the lonely island in order that the city might be freed from his too insistent word and testimony, he was providentially taken into a retreat where he was beside ‘the deep sea and the mighty things.’ The story of his exile is outlined in two phrases: ‘I was in the isle … I was in the Spirit’ (Revelation 1:9-10). The realism was transfigured, and in that aegean where aeschylus heard ποντίων κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα (Prom. 89 f.), St. John listened to ‘the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters’ (Revelation 19:6).
Literature.-L. Ross, Reisen auf den griéchischen Inseln des ägäischen Meeres, Halle, 1840-1845; V. Guérin, Description de l’ile de Patmos et de l’ile de Samos, Paris, 1856; H. F. Tozer, Islands of the aegean, London, 1890, pp. 178-195.
James Strahan.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Patmos'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/patmos.html. 1906-1918.
