The Revelation of John is written on Patmos

The Book of Revelation was written near the end of the first century, most often dated to around 95 CE during the reign of the emperor Domitian. Its author names himself John and places himself on Patmos, a rocky island in the Aegean, dictating a revealed vision "of things which must soon take place." It is the last book of the Christian New Testament and the most consequential apocalypse the West produced.

The vision runs on a strict before-and-after logic that became the genre's template. Seven seals open on conquest, war, famine, plague, and cosmic disturbance; seven trumpets sound further woes on sea, river, and sky; seven bowls pour the final wrath. Two image-streams carry the book: a woman and a dragon, the Lamb and the beasts marked with 666, and a call to endurance for those who will not worship the beast. The climax is the battle of Armageddon, the binding of Satan for a thousand years, the raising of the dead at the great white throne, and a new heaven and a new earth with the New Jerusalem descending like a bride.

The sequence, judgment of the old order followed by a renewed creation, is inherited from the Jewish prophets and, behind them, from Zoroastrian eschatology. Read as a timetable it has fed two millennia of failed predictions; read as the unveiling literature it is, it fixed the West's defining picture of how the world ends in light. Its central gift to the imagination is the shape itself: first the end, then the beginning again.

The text written is treated under Book of Revelation.

The circumstances were persecution or the memory of it: the author names himself John, says he is on Patmos "on account of the word of God," and addresses seven congregations in Asia Minor, one of which, Smyrna, is told that prison is coming. The dating rests on two pillars, the internal evidence of imperial cult pressure matching Domitian's reign rather than Nero's, and Irenaeus's statement, written around 180 CE, that the vision was seen "toward the end of Domitian's reign." A minority tradition prefers Nero's decade, and the sixty-six of the beast reads cleanly as Nero either way.

The book nearly missed the canon. It was contested in the East for centuries, doubted by Dionysius of Alexandria, excluded by several early lists, and accepted finally largely through liturgical use. Its imagery descends from Daniel and the apocalypses between. Its place at the end of the New Testament is a placement decision, not a chronological one: Revelation was probably written before several of the epistles that precede it.