Wahyu 22:6-8

A Final Reminder

22:6 Then ¹  the angel ²  said to me, “These words are reliable ³  and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants ⁴  what must happen soon.”

22:7 (Look! I am coming soon!

Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy expressed in this book.) ⁵ 

22:8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things, ⁶  and when I heard and saw them, ⁷  I threw myself down ⁸  to worship at the feet of the angel who was showing them to me.

Wahyu 22:18-19

22:18 I testify to the one who hears the words of the prophecy contained in this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described ⁹  in this book. 22:19 And if anyone takes away from the words of this book of prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life ¹⁰  and in the holy city that are described in this book.

[22:6]  ¹ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence within the narrative.

[22:6]  ² tn Grk “he”; the referent (the angel mentioned in 21:9, 15; 22:1) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[22:6]  ³ tn Grk “faithful.”

[22:6]  ⁴ tn See the note on the word “servants” in 1:1.

[22:7]  ⁵ sn These lines are parenthetical, forming an aside to the narrative. The speaker here is the Lord Jesus Christ himself rather than the narrator.

[22:8]  ⁶ tn Or “I am John, the one who heard and saw these things.”

[22:8]  ⁷ tn The pronoun “them” is not in the Greek text, but is implied. Direct objects were frequently omitted in Greek when clear from the context.

[22:8]  ⁸ tn Grk “I fell down and worshiped at the feet.” BDAG 815 s.v. πίπτω 1.b.α.ב. has “fall down, throw oneself to the ground as a sign of devotion or humility, before high-ranking persons or divine beings.”

[22:18]  ⁹ tn Grk “written.”

[22:19]  ¹⁰ tc The Textus Receptus, on which the KJV rests, reads “the book” of life (ἀπὸ βίβλου, apo biblou) instead of “the tree” of life. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the NT he had access to no Greek mss for the last six verses of Revelation. So he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek at this point. As a result he created seventeen textual variants which were not in any Greek mss. The most notorious of these is this reading. It is thus decidedly inauthentic, while “the tree” of life, found in the best and virtually all Greek mss, is clearly authentic. The confusion was most likely due to an intra-Latin switch: The form of the word for “tree” in Latin in this passage is ligno; the word for “book” is libro. The two-letter difference accounts for an accidental alteration in some Latin mss; that “book of life” as well as “tree of life” is a common expression in the Apocalypse probably accounts for why this was not noticed by Erasmus or the KJV translators. (This textual problem is not discussed in NA²⁷.)