Revelation 22:16

ἐπὶ ταῖς. 1 Primas[887] (vobis septem) omit ἐπί. Lach[888] reads ἐν with A.

[887] Primasius, edited by Haussleiter.
[888] Lachmann’s larger edition.

γένος. Text. Rec[889] adds τοῦ with 1, which contains nothing after δᾶδ = δανείδ to the end of the book.

[889] Rec. Textus Receptus as printed by Scrivener.

16. ἐγὼ Ἰησοῦς. Here only does our Lord reveal His Name, though from Revelation 1:13; Revelation 1:18 onwards, it has been obvious that He is the revealer; as was expressed in the title, Revelation 1:1. Whether He is personally present, however, is doubtful: the words are His, but it is probably still the Angel that speaks them.

τὸν ἄγγελόν μου. Would our Lord say this of any Angel of the Lord, because “all things that the Father hath are His”? Or has our Lord, as Man, an Angel of His own in the same way that His saints have? This passage is at least consistent with the view that His Angel appears in His form, as St Peter’s was supposed to do, Acts 12:15. It is very ably argued by St Augustine (de Cura pro Mortuis), that if any apparitions after death or at the moment of death are really objective and supernatural, they must be ascribed to angels, not to the spirits of the dead. But we must remember that our Lord’s state is not the same as that of His departed servants. He is already in the body of the Resurrection, and so conceivably visible. And there can be no doubt that He appeared in His own risen body to St Paul, and probably to St Stephen. It may be therefore, that He now appears personally to St John, at once superseding and authenticating the previous ministry of the Angel.

ἡ ῥίζα καὶ τὸ γένος Δαυείδ. For the former of these identical titles see on Revelation 5:5. The accumulation of synonyms in this and the next clause is like “assemble” and “meet,” “dissemble” and “cloke” in the Prayer-book.

ὁ�. There may be a reference to Numbers 24:17, or to the title of “the Day-spring,” St Luke 1:78, and perhaps Zechariah 3:8; Zechariah 6:12. In Revelation 2:28, though the words are more nearly the same as here, the sense is different; see note there.