Revelation 21:1 to Revelation 22:5. The Vision of the New Jerusalem. The doctrine of the new heaven and the new earth goes back to Isaiah 65:17, and is derived from the belief that the present world was so corrupt that it could not possibly be the seat of the Messianic kingdom, at any rate in its present condition. The idea was developed in the apocalyptic literature, especially in Ethiopic Enoch, the Apocalypse of Baruch,, 4 Ezra. Some expositors hold that the New Jerusalem was established with the foundation of the Christian religion, and that the history of the Church is the history of the building of the city. But such an interpretation is mere allegorising. The writer of Rev. indicates in the clearest possible way that the holy city will not be established upon earth till after the final judgment, and the description of the manner of its appearance does not correspond at all to anything in the history of Christianity. It is only by abandoning the plain meaning of the text that we can construe this description of the New Jerusalem in terms of the history of the Church. The writer of Rev. regarded it at any rate not as something which was to be slowly evolved in the process of the centuries, but as the final dé nouement of history and the last intervention of God.
An interesting attempt to rearrange chs. 20- 22 has recently been made by Charles (ET, xxvi. pp. 54 f., 119 f.) on the ground of the difficulty in harmonising certain statements in Revelation 21 with the situation described in Revelation 20. In Revelation 20:13-15, for instance, the final judgment has already taken place, and condemned sinners have been plunged into the lake of fire; yet in Revelation 21:8 the wicked are still described as dwelling outside the Holy City, and there is still a possibility of moral recovery; cf. Revelation 22:2, the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. In order to avoid this apparent contradiction, Charles suggests that the writer intended to arrange his material in the following order; Revelation 20:1-3; Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:2; Revelation 22:14-15; Revelation 22:17; Revelation 20:4-15; Revelation 21:1-8; Revelation 22:6-7; Revelation 22:16; Revelation 22:13; Revelation 22:12; Revelation 22:8-10; Revelation 22:20. According to this scheme the account of the millennial reign of Christ is very much expanded, and contains a vision of the New Jerusalem which comes down from heaven to be the abode of Christ and the glorified martyrs during 1000 years. The rearrangement, however, is so intricate that Charles has to assume that the author of the book died after reaching Revelation 20:3, and that the material which he left for the completion of the book was put together by a faithful but unintelligent disciple. Beet in his reply to Charles (ET, xxvi. p. 217) argues that no such rearrangement is necessary, since the lake of fire need not have caused extinction of life in the case of the wicked any more than in the case of the beast and the false prophet, who are described in Revelation 20:10 as being tormented for ever and ever. Other scholars, e.g. Vö lter, J. Weiss, Spitta, and Bousset, prefer to assume that the materials for these Chapter s were derived from two, three, or even four different sources which the author of Rev. has not attempted to harmonise.
The vision of the New Jerusalem may be divided into the following sections: (a) the distant view of the new city (Revelation 21:1-8), (b) the measuring of the city (Revelation 21:9-17), (c) the character of the city (Revelation 21:18-27), (d) the river and tree of life (Revelation 22:1-5).