Patmos

Patmos is one of the Dodecanese, in the southeastern Aegean. It is small. The commonly cited area is about thirty-four square kilometres, near thirteen square miles, in three rocky lobes joined by two narrow necks, which is why the harbour at Skala sits where it does. From the coordinates on this row the island lies about seventy kilometres, roughly forty-three miles, from Miletus, and about a hundred kilometres, roughly sixty-two miles, from Ephesus. The nearest point of the mainland coast is closer, on the order of sixty-five kilometres or forty miles. A letter written on the island reached the seven cities in days. The ancient remains are thin next to a tell like Jericho, and the page says so. Kastelli, the hill above the harbour, carries fortification walls in large blocks around a small fortified settlement, and it is the main visible ancient site. Greek inscriptions record a sanctuary of Artemis, called Artemis Patmia. The temple is traditionally sited on the height where the monastery now stands, on the reasoning that a later sacred building takes the earlier sacred high point. The inscriptions are the firm part of that. The siting under the monastery is an inference rather than an excavated fact. Otto Meinardus's topographical work on Patmos is the standard reference for these remains. What is missing should be said before anything else is described. There is no excavated first-century Christian material on Patmos. Nothing found on the island ties any site to John by name: no inscription, no object, no building of the period. The Christian topography of Patmos is a topography of tradition. Roman law is where the question of imprisonment is actually settled. There were two forms of island banishment. Relegatio in insulam sent a man to a named island and left him his citizenship and normally his property; he could not leave, and he was not enslaved, not chained and not set to work. Deportatio in insulam was the heavier sentence, permanent, with loss of citizenship and confiscation of property. Both are gathered in the Digest of Justinian, title 48.22. Island banishment is well attested as a penalty for men of standing, and Tacitus and Juvenal name islands actually used for it, among them Gyaros, Seriphos, Amorgos and Pandateria. Patmos is not named as an exile island in any surviving Roman source. That cuts against a picture many readers arrive with, and it settles nothing either way, because islands outside the literary list were still available to a provincial governor. The mines are the other question a visitor asks. The earliest source for them is Victorinus of Pettau, writing in Latin about AD 300 and the earliest surviving Latin commentator on Revelation, who says on Revelation 10:11 that John was condemned to the labour of the mines by Domitian and was dismissed from the mines when Domitian was killed. His words stand in the voices below with their date. Four things sit against the claim. No Roman source describes mines or quarries on Patmos, and Pliny, who lists the island, says nothing of the kind. No workings of the period have been identified there, and the island is small and volcanic. Condemnation to the mines was a servile punishment that carried loss of freedom and was normally served at the great imperial mining districts, in Sardinia, Egypt and Cyprus, rather than on a small Aegean island with no ore. And Victorinus writes about two hundred years after the event, working from the text in front of him. William Ramsay judged in The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (1904) that the mines are Victorinus's own inference from the harshness of the sentence, and that the sentence behind Revelation 1:9 was relegatio. This page prints both sides and stamps no verdict on either. The date of the exile is disputed, and the older attestation belongs to the Domitianic reading, about AD 95. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies 5.30.3 about AD 180, says the vision was seen towards the end of Domitian's reign, and he claims a line back to Polycarp, who knew John. Clement of Alexandria about AD 200 has John returning from the isle of Patmos to Ephesus after the tyrant was dead, without naming him. Victorinus names Domitian about AD 300. Eusebius, in the Ecclesiastical History 3.18 to 3.20, places the banishment in Domitian's fifteenth year and reports the release and the return to Ephesus under Nerva, after the senate annulled Domitian's acts. Jerome says the same in 392. Tertullian, about AD 200, reports that John was banished to an island and names neither the emperor nor the island, so he is a witness to the banishment and not to the date. The Neronian reading, about AD 65 to 68, is a minority position with real holders, and it is argued from the text of Revelation itself. Revelation 11:1 to 11:2 has John told to measure the temple of God and the altar, which some read as a temple still standing, that is, before AD 70. Revelation 17:9 to 17:10 has seven kings, five fallen and one reigning, which some count out to Nero. John A. T. Robinson made the case for a pre-70 date for the whole New Testament in Redating the New Testament (SCM, 1976), and Kenneth L. Gentry Jr. made the book-length case for Revelation in Before Jerusalem Fell (1989). The heading of Revelation in the Syriac version names Nero rather than Domitian, and it is a later witness than Irenaeus. An older tradition names Claudius, in Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 51, repeated by Apringius of Beja about AD 600, and almost nobody holds it today. This page prints the two live positions with their names, years and works, and settles the question no further. The island's Christian sites enter the record long after the first century, and their dates are traced rather than assumed. Ian Boxall's Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse (Oxford, 2013) works out when each site and each story first appears, and this page follows him for those dates instead of asserting them.