"The revelation." The book is named from its own first word: apokalypsis — an unveiling, the pulling-back of a curtain ("Apocalypse" is simply this word left untranslated; the modern sense of "catastrophe" is a later accretion — the word means disclosure). The opening verse hands down a chain of custody: God → Jesus Christ → his angel → his slave John → the slaves of God; and it states the book's method in one verb — "he made it known in signs" (esēmanen, from sēmeion, "sign": the shelf's "signified," KJV ASV Douay). A book that tells you on its first line that it will speak in symbols has already given you its reading instructions. On "slaves" (douloi): the shelf softens to "servants" (KJV, NIV; ASV margins "bondservants") while the NWT reads "slaves" plainly — as does this translation, on the same plain-word principle as "slave-girl" for Hagar (Genesis 16).

"What must happen soon… the time is near." Said honestly: this is the book's hardest word, and it stands in the first paragraph. En tachei means "soon, quickly" — not "someday" — and readers have wrestled with the nearness ever since (the main proposals: fulfilled in the first-century crisis; "soon" on God's clock, "one day as a thousand years"; or inaugurated then and still unwinding). This translation prints "soon" and leaves the wrestling in the notes, where it belongs. Then the book's first beatitude (there will be seven): "blessed is the one who reads aloud" — ho anaginōskōn is the public lector, one reader before a listening assembly; a window straight into how this book was first experienced: performed whole, in one sitting, out loud.

The Name that refuses to decline. Verse 4 contains the most famous deliberate grammatical error in the Greek Bible. After apo ("from"), Greek requires the genitive case — and John writes the nominative, three times: "from THE ONE WHO IS, AND WHO WAS, AND WHO IS COMING." Every Greek schoolboy would wince; John knows exactly what he is doing. Ho ōn, "the One Who Is," is the Greek Bible's rendering of the divine name's own explanation at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) — and John treats the title as indeclinable, refusing to bend the Name to fit his sentence, grammar yielding to God rather than God to grammar. This translation sets the phrase in small capitals to mark the standing stone in the syntax. It is the divine name unfolded into three tenses — and where a Hebrew chapter would print Jehovah, this Greek circumlocution is the closest the New Testament comes to spelling it (see the Ask Mr. Librarian page on the Name).

One Greek letter: washed, or freed? Verse 5 carries a textual crux you can hear in English: the manuscripts split between lysanti ("freed/loosed us from our sins") and lousanti ("washed us from our sins") — one letter apart, and pronounced almost identically. The older witnesses read "freed" (so ASV "loosed," NIV "has freed," NWT "loosed"); the later text behind the Reformation Bibles read "washed" (KJV Geneva, and Douay from the Vulgate's lavit). This translation follows the critical text: freed. The same seam runs through verse 6: the older text reads "made us a kingdom, priests" (Exodus 19:6's "a kingdom of priests," echoed); the later text behind KJV reads "kings and priests." And note the titles of verse 5 — "the faithful witness" (martys, the word already migrating toward English "martyr"), "the firstborn of the dead" (on "firstborn" as rank, not manufacture, see the Is Jesus God? page), "the ruler of the kings of the earth" — a threefold claim staked, under a Roman emperor, from a penal island.

"Look — he is coming with the clouds." Idou — the Greek heir of the Hebrew hineh, rendered "Look —" throughout this translation. The verse is a fusion of two prophets: the cloud-rider who approaches the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:13, and Zechariah's "they will look on me, whom they pierced, and mourn" (Zechariah 12:10) — the same Zechariah text John's Gospel quotes at the cross. "Beat their breasts" is the mourning gesture the Greek actually names (kopsontai); the shelf's "wail" and "mourn" soften it to sound alone.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega… the Almighty." The first letter and the last letter of the Greek alphabet — A to Z, with everything between implied. (KJV adds "the beginning and the ending" here — a phrase the later manuscripts imported from 21:6; the older text says it with the letters alone.) Then a word this project has met before, from the other side: pantokratōr, "the Almighty" — the very Greek word the old translators reached for when they guessed at El Shaddai in Genesis (see the note at 17:1, where this translation refused "Almighty" because the Hebrew's meaning is uncertain). Here there is no guess: the Greek itself says pantokratōr, "the all-holding" — the title is native, and this translation prints it gladly. Revelation uses it nine times; the rest of the New Testament, once. One more shelf note, factually: the NWT prints "says Jehovah God" in this verse — restoring the name where the Greek has kyrios ho theos, on its argument that the phrase quotes the Old Testament's naming formulas; the Greek text itself reads "Lord God," and that is what stands in the verse above.

Which John? The book says only "John" — no "apostle," no "son of Zebedee," just "your brother, and companion in the affliction." Tradition from the second century (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus) identifies him with the apostle, author of the Gospel; but the question is not modern — Dionysius of Alexandria, in the third century, already argued from style that the Gospel and the Apocalypse cannot come from the same hand (the Gospel's Greek is smooth; Revelation's is wild, Hebrew-boned, and — as verse 4 just showed — deliberately lawless), and proposed a second John, "John of Patmos." The congregation kept the book either way. This translation reports the question and translates the text, which claims only the name.

Patmos, and the Lord's day. A small rocky island off the Asian coast — Rome used such islands for banishment, and "because of the word of God" reads most naturally as exile for preaching. "I came to be in the Spirit on the Lord's day" (kyriakē hēmera) — the phrase's first appearance in all literature: almost certainly Sunday, the resurrection's weekday, which soon bore this name everywhere Greek was spoken (a quiet counter-coinage, too — "the Emperor's day" was already a phrase in the Roman east). The voice commands a scroll for seven congregations, named in exact geographic order: Ephesus north to Smyrna and Pergamum, then inland and south through Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — a courier's circuit; the book is a circular letter, and the list is its postal route. Their seven letters are the next two chapters.

"One like a son of man." The vision is built almost entirely from Daniel 7 — but with one staggering transfer. In Daniel, "one like a son of man" comes with the clouds to the Ancient of Days, whose "hair is like pure wool" and whose clothing is "white as snow" (Daniel 7:9, 13). Here the son of man wears the Ancient of Days' own description: "his head and his hair were white like wool, white as snow." The two figures of Daniel's throne-room have become one — the chapter's boldest sentence, spoken entirely in imagery (the deity-of-Christ argument built on such texts is catalogued on the Is Jesus God? page). On the capitalization crux: KJV prints "like unto the Son of man" — a confessing capital — where ASV prints "like unto a son of man," indefinite, as the Greek is; this translation reads "one like a son of man" and lets the vision make the argument.

The rest of the figure is a mosaic of the prophets: the long robe and golden sash are priestly vesture (Exodus 28); eyes "like a flame of fire" and feet "like fine bronze… glowing in a furnace" come from the great visions of Daniel 10 and Ezekiel 1 (chalkolibanon, rendered "fine bronze," is a word found nowhere else in Greek literature — a guess by every translator since, honestly made); the voice "like the sound of many waters" is Ezekiel's for the glory of God (Ezekiel 43:2); and "out of his mouth a sharp two-edged sword" is Isaiah's servant, whose mouth is "like a sharp sword" (Isaiah 49:2) — the figure's only weapon is what he says. Seven stars in his right hand; a face like the sun in its strength. John is shown nothing that a prophet had not seen — and everything at once.

"Do not be afraid." John falls "like a dead man" — and the hand that holds seven stars is laid on him, with the vision-word spoken to every terrified seer: mē phobou. It is the word Abram heard in the Bible's first prophetic vision — "Do not be afraid, Abram" (Genesis 15:1) — spoken now at the last book's first vision; the canon opens and closes its visions with the same reassurance. Then a self-naming that out-claims every title so far: "I am the first and the last" — which is not a new coinage but a quotation: it is Jehovah's own self-description in Isaiah ("I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god," Isaiah 44:6) — on the lips of the one who says, in the next breath, "and I was dead." The two claims sit in one sentence, and every reading of who Jesus is must pass through it (both readings, at full strength, on the Is Jesus God? page).

"The keys of Death and of Hades." Hadēs is the Greek Bible's rendering of the Hebrew Sheol — the grave-realm, the place of the dead, not the fiery hell of later imagery; KJV prints "the keys of hell and of death" (its text also reverses the order), where ASV and NIV keep "Hades" — as here. Keys mean custody: the door locks from his side now. Then the chapter closes with a gift rare in apocalyptic — the vision interprets itself: "the seven stars are angels of the seven congregations, and the seven lampstands are seven congregations." The book has shown its method twice now — it speaks in signs (v1), and its signs can be read. The "angels" of the congregations (guardian spirits? human messengers? the congregations' heavenly doubles?) are argued over to this day — the seven letters that follow are addressed to them, whoever they are.