The reader may share my suspicion of reception criticism, a suspicion expressly addressed by this book, that it can amount to ‘little more than an exercise in listing or cataloguing’ (p. 209). Boxall, while allowing this criticism, also qualifies it, arguing that there is an intrinsic analytical dimension to any study of the history of the interpretation or use of a text. In general I remain to be convinced, suspecting that the author is being too modest to highlight the extent to which this book in particular is a striking exception to the norm. At the very least, we should acknowledge that, if intellectually unchallenging and frankly tedious list-making lie at one end of a spectrum, then this book lies at the opposite extreme, for it is a work that manages the difficult task of combining exact and detailed scholarship and theological wisdom with great readability. That the book is the fruit of doctoral studies makes it the more remarkable.
Part of the reason for the success of this book is that the author sets himself a bold task: he does more than demonstrate the great many ways in which the island of Patmos, as the place in which the author of the Apocalypse is said to receive his vision (Revelation 1:9), has been understood and appropriated from the patristic period to the present day; he also highlights very convincingly the theological and indeed historical-critical paucity of much post-enlightenment criticism (with some honourable exceptions) compared with the richness of the preceding centuries. In his conclusion, he demonstrates the necessity for today's biblical scholars to situate themselves within the great stream of interpretive tradition that takes us back to the apostolic era. Moreover, he show that two contrasting failures can result from the lack of this due respect to reception history: not only, on the one hand, might the scholar's ignorance result in an impoverished reading, but also, on the other, there may be an unconsidered adoption of scholarly opinion that has emerged from the history of reception without due regard to historical facticity.
For example, Boxall shows that the picture painted in many modern commentaries of Patmos as a place of exile, desolation and suffering owes much more to the imaginations of (especially) early Protestant readers who implicitly or explicitly aligned St John's experience on Patmos with their own perceived situation than it does to any credible historical evidence. Not that Boxall is dismissive of such an ‘actualising’ reading: on the contrary, he argues rightly that the explanation given at Rev. 1:9 for St John's presence on Patmos is, pace the majority of modern commentators, irreducibly ambiguous and that this ambiguity, which may even be deliberate on the part of the author, has the positive effect of inviting a wide variety of imaginative readings. And if Boxall wishes us to take away one message from his book, I believe it is a plea for a more imaginative engagement with a scriptural text and a move away from the dryness that is so often found in historical criticism that does not respect its interpretive predecessors.
This wide variety of readings is demonstrated by the author in a more-or-less chronological arrangement, dividing the reception history into patristic (2nd to 5th centuries), early and late medieval (6th to 10th centuries then 1000 to 1516) and 1517 to the present day. This has the nice effect of bracketing works from the nineteenth century onwards (where the history of scholarship typically begins in modern commentaries) with those of the early reformation and counter-reformation period. Two exceptions are made to this chronological scheme: after the chapter on the later medieval traditions in the West, another treats of Eastern (especially but not exclusively Greek) readings. This is a prudent move, for the Apocalypse's reception in the East is famously distinct from that in the West, and for two reasons: first, because the book was accepted into the canon with much greater reluctance in the East, but second, and less well-known, because of the great popularity and influence of the Acts of John by Prochorus, an apocryphal biographical tradition which accreted its own additions and parallel oral traditions, such that Patmos became the setting not just for the Apocalypse but also for a substantial chunk of St John's life, and sometimes even of his death.
The second exception to the chronological scheme is a substantial and fascinating chapter on Patmos in the visual arts, illustrated with eight full-colour plates in the middle of the book. Here Boxall is able to take full advantage of a recent burgeoning of study of scripture-inspired art, a growth industry that, as much as text-based reception criticism, is often vulnerable to accusations of a lack of analytical rigour; as with the rest of this book, Boxall's excursion into art history avoids this entirely, and had this reviewer flicking back and forth between text and illustration with engrossed fascination.
The available space does not permit to do more than hint at the great riches of this book: Patmos as place of exile and bloodless martyrdom, as new Eden, as the boundary between heaven and earth, as an etymologically-encoded cypher for Judea, or as type of the monastery; the surprising genealogical links between these and other ideas; the unique contributions of St Francis and St Christodoulos; Patmos in romantic poetry and in Greek cave paintings; or the surprising notion of a typological relationship between St John and Jacob in a Dominican commentary of the thirteenth century. Yet the reader could gain a great deal, and without any distortion, simply by reading the introduction and conclusion, in which Boxall enunciates a deeply convincing case for a form of biblical theology of which he has provided a superb and most engaging example.
