Revelation 17:6

Cf. Nahum's “bloody city” (of Assyrian cruelty to prisoners, Revelation 3:1), and for the metaphor Cic. Phil. ii. 24, 29, or Suet. Tiberius, 59, or Pliny, H. N. xiv. 28, “quo facile intelligatur ebrius jam sanguine ciuium, et tanto magis eum sitiens,” also Jos. Bell. Revelation 17:8; Revelation 17:2. When a Jewish source is postulated, καὶ … Ἰησοῦ is bracketed (e.g., by Vischer, Spitta, S. Davidson, Briggs, Charles and others) as from the hand of the later Christian editor, who here, as in Revelation 18:24 (Mommsen), is thinking of the condemnation of provincial prisoners to fight with gladiators or wild beasts in the arena of the capital. The ἅγιοι of the source would thus be defined as, or supplemented by, Christian martyrs. They are not contaminated, like the rest of men, but their purity is won at the expense of their life. The Jewish martyrs would be those killed in the war of 66 70, primarily. The whole verse, however, might be (cf. Revelation 18:24) editorial; it is the contaminations, rather than the cruelties, of Rome which absorb the interest of this oracle.