37 An Explanation for the Anacolutha in the Book of Revelation Jeske22, Stuart23 and Barclay24 cite Pausanius: ‘Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus will be.’ Aune goes as far as suggesting that Jews may have transposed Hellenistic uses of the respective tenses to their divinities upon Yahweh25. That being said, these propositions don’t actually explain the anacolutha. In fact, it appears that John’s grammatical anomalies do not correspond to anything that has been written in the first century or earlier, which is why commentators have come to the conclusion that John’s language contains solecisms. Wallace refers to the whole of this verse as ‘…the first and the worst grammatical solecism in Revelation’26. ὁ ὢν, however, is not a solecism or an anacoluthon because it is acting as an indeclinable proper noun, Yah- weh (Exodus 3:14, LXX). The phrase manipulates the mind and informs the reader that ἀπὸ does not always require the genitive, in fact when the expected case is not present, then the reader should search their common presupposition pools for any possible suitable antecedent. The first anacoluthon in Revelation occurs in the following clause καὶ ὁ ἦν. Here we see an imperfect indicative verb with a nominative singular masculine article bearing substantival force, which in itself, is unusual. Since this clause follows ἀπὸ one would also expect any substantive to be in the genitive. However, due to the proximity of ὁ ἦν to ὁ ὢν, it is clear to the reader that the former is an extrapolation of the latter. John has transposed qualities of ὁ ὢν onto ὁ ἦν. Consequently, ὁ ἦν appears to be a subset of ὁ ὢν it acts as a proper noun, and as such, should not adopt the genitive case. It is the presence of ὁ ἦν that introduces the concept of legitimate anacoluthon into Revelation. John has not made a mistake; he has extrapolated. The reader is able to follow the logic, even though the text is lacking in grammatical succession. The presence of ὁ ἦν influences the hermeneutic of the reader; whereas the presence of ὁ ὢν informed the reader that they should search their common presupposition pools, namely the OT, for information, yet the presence of ὁ ἦν tells the reader that they should also remember the text that they have heard because John will extrapolate from his own constructs27. The following mention of ὁ ἐρχόμενος (1:4) embeds this idea in the mind of the reader. R. Jeske, Revelation for Today (Philadelphia 1983) 35. 22 M. Stuart, A Commentary on the Apocalypse (Edinburgh 1898) 428. 23 W. Barclay, The Revelation of John vol. 1 (Philadelphia 1960) 37. 24 D. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World 25 (Grand Rapids 1983) Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids 1996) 63. 26 Wallace (Wallace, Greek Grammar, 64) says, ‘…it seems that 1:4 may function some- 27 what paradigmatically for many of the solecisms [in Revelation].’ If this is the situation, then the construct cannot be a solecism, because this ‘mistake of grammar’ would not be a mistake.