These two books deal in different ways with aspects of the reception history of the Revelation of St John the Divine. Eugenia Constantinou amplifies and qualifies the account that she gave in the introduction and notes to her translation of Andrew of Caesarea's Commentary on the Apocalypse (Fathers of the Church cxxiii [2011]). Ian Boxall offers a diachronically historical and theological reflection on a single sentence from the Divine i. 9: ‘I was on the island called Patmos.’ There is little overlap between the two books, despite the community of genre. I start with Constantinou's. Andrew's Commentary was, she shows, important for winning a place for the Apocalypse in graecophone Orthodoxy and its non-graecophone offspring. The West accepted the work as ‘scripture’, so far as is known, ab initio. Eusebius' critique of the work and its favoured status amongst troublesome millenarians probably ensured a deliberate disregard amongst Antiochene churchmen which has continued in their Syriac-speaking offshoots. Andrew is shown to have written a commentary, fully orthodox and meeting the religious needs of his time, which was to become the standard understanding of the work in Eastern Christianity. If something like the question whether he succeeded in establishing it ‘in its scriptural canon’ be asked the answer must be ‘yes and no’, with the qualification that so much depends on what the question means and implies, that it is imprudent ever to ask it. Constantinou has settled, so far as I can see, one issue about the date and scope of the Commentary and plausibly speculated about some others. Andrew wrote in response, negative and positive, to an earlier commentary by a non-Chalcedonian (Severian?) going under the name of ‘Oecumenius’ (also translated in Fathers of the Church cxii [2006], ed. J. N. Suggit) who has been identified in various encyclopedia articles as a correspondent of Severus of Antioch (d. 538). That cannot be the case if Oecumenius means it when he says that more than 500 years have elapsed since John said his words on Patmos in the reign of Domitian (pp. 81–96). Constantinou quite properly refuses to rubbish this vital datum in favour of a fancied identification. She has other arguments to add but this is the most important, and I salute a historian who reads what an ancient author says and will not yield to sophisms aimed at explaining away evidence inconvenient to a pre-established theory. A rough date for Oecumenius towards the 600s having been arrived at and his doctrinal stance fixed, a date and setting for Andrew and his Commentary can be in part determined, in part conjectured. It is claimed, plausibly in view of the disturbances of the time especially in Caesarea, that it was written in 610 and its dedicatee was the Patriarch Sergius i (610–38), famous for his zealous defence of the Capital. The Commentary itself, not perhaps a pleasure to read, but certainly not a pain either, is as straightforward and irenic as any interpretation of that dense and fierce book will allow. Constantinou draws out in successive chapters themes and ideas which were important to Andrew and his first readers, most significantly, I would think, the notion that the end that St John had forecast was not nigh, tumultuous though the times were. Her interpretation of Andrew is sympathetic and loyal to the text. I found it broadly convincing.

Ian Boxall's book too features Oecumenius, (about whom he takes the view rejected by Constantinou) and more briefly Andrew and his Commentary, as he recounts and discusses their understanding of the verse in question in an extended evaluation of its interpretation throughout Christian history. That interpretation is not only verbal. Some beautiful pictures are reproduced in evidence. The choice of that verse was felicitous because it is made to yield so much. So much what? Insight, I would have to say, I fear, vaguely: certainly not any solution to a defined problem or new historical datum. As a re-worked doctoral dissertation, this book is crammed with little budgets of often interesting information about the authors of opinions about the verse or of meditations on it. Nothing, however, related to what I feel obliged still to call facts, or to the right or wrong of an opinion about the text is at issue. It does not actually matter from the point of view of this book how truthfully an author described an actual Patmos or even whether he knew where it was. It was, partly in consequence, pleasant to read, introducing, as it did, especially in its section on the Eastern tradition, such imaginative additions to the tale and winning transformations of landscape. The book (it is a good book) not only records the verse's reception, or at least a sample of it since there has been an infinite number of receiving readers whose own acts of reception must be part of a history known only to God if he exists. It does, besides, this much at least: it argues and I think succeeds in showing that the insight that it has delivered can probably light up present-day exegesis of a biblical text, and introduce ideas unexpected by a too bare post-Enlightenment analysis. That, however, it is for New Testament students to decide.