Book of Revelation: A Annotated Bibliography, The

The Book of Revelation: An Annotated Bibliography. By Robert L. Muse. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1387. New York: Garland, 1996, xxxvi + 352 pp., $58.00.

Robert Muse has done Biblical scholarship an invaluable service in providing a full and readable annotated bibliography on the book of Revelation. He reviews significant monographs, commentaries and articles published in English, French and German, and he lists most unpublished dissertations in English, from roughly 19401990. The major commentaries from the first half of this century (Lohmeyer, Schmidt, Ramsay, Charles, Bousset, Allo, Loisy, Beckwith, Swete) are also included, and reference is made, though with little or no annotation, to some works in Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Greek.

The book is divided into six chapters: an 11-page introduction, in which Muse surveys the contents of Revelation on a broad, section-by-section basis and discusses exegetical issues and research trends relating those sections, followed by annotated bibliographies of historical-critical research on Revelation, compositional studies, exegetical/expositional studies, theological/thematic studies, and the Revelation in the life of the Church. Indices of authors and of Scripture and ancient texts are also included. Though the layout is generally useful, the book is marred by an incomplete crossreferencing system. The reader is infrequently alerted that a work found in one section of Revelation equally pertains to another section, and one is never pointed in a later section to a work already listed in an earlier section. So, for example, research on the Christology of Revelation requires consultation of both section C of chap. 5 (Jesus Christ) and section H of the same chapter (Other themes [(18) The Lamb|), though no cross reference specifies as much. Furthermore, Ulrich Muller's Messias und Menschensohn might be missed entirely since it is only listed in chap. 3 (I)-Source and Revision Hypotheses-and not cross-listed in 5C. Examples of this sort are numerous. This is not to say, however, that Revelation will not reward the researcher richly. For anyone working in Revelation, the book is a must. The annotations are usually very helpful, and the bibliography is a remarkably thorough (though Jon Paulien's Andrews University dissertation, published in 1988 as Decoding Revelation's Trumpets, is notably absent). The user not already familiar with the field must beware, however, that Revelation's abundant treasure can only be mined with more than casual effort.

Alan Hultberg

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL

Copyright Evangelical Theological Society Sep 1998
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