An Anglican on the ‘Two Witnesses’

Extract

In August and October, 1926, the Anglican Quarterly, Theology, published two remarkable articles written by the Ireland Professor of Exegesis at Oxford (C. H. Turner) and entitled ‘St. Peter in the New Testament.’ Their writer was a scholar of such competence in Biblical and Patristic studies that his advocacy of the Petrine claims made his articles the most important work on Anglo-Roman controversy since Newman’s Development.

One point especially was almost a startling innovation which might have identified an anonymous writer not with England but with Rome. Let the writer make the point in his own words :

‘It cannot be reasonably questioned that the thought of Rome, the imperial city, the stronghold of the anti-Christian power, is very close to the mind of the seer (i.e. St. John in writing the Apocalypse) in certain points of his vision.

‘The Beast is the emperor and the head slain to death and his death-wound was healed (Apoc. xiii, 3) can be no other than Nero, the expectation of whose return from the East was so vivid till the end of the first century.