Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Catholic talk show. Today we're going to be looking at the interpretation of the book of Revelation.

That's right. We're really excited to have Jimmy Aiken with us. I'm a master apologist and someone who's going to really help us unpack this very mysterious book of the Bible.

It's great to have Jimmy back on and guess what? I mean, I dressed up for this occasion because you've never seen me in a suit coat because there's a number one fan of Jimmy Aiken and it happens to be my bishop.

So if there's any chance of him watching a show, it's this one. So let's get started.

Alright, Jimmy, great to have you on the show. Apparently you influence wardrobe here on the talk show. Thank you for that.

Bishop Paul Meyer has absolutely expressed his regular attendance and everything that you do, Jimmy, and it's a joy to have you back on the show.

Well, thank you so much. It's great to be back and hello to the bishop.

So Jimmy, before we get started, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and where they can find you. You work with Catholic answers, you work a mysterious world and more.

Sure. So I'm an, I'm an apologist for my day job and I work for Catholic answers. Our website is Catholic.com. I am these days the longest standing employee at Catholic answers. I'm in my 30th year.

I'll have my 30th anniversary of working for Catholic answers next June 1st, the feast day of Justin Martyr, which is who's the patron of apologist. So that was a fortuitous providential report to work date that was not planned.

People can check out my stuff at my personal website, Jimmy Akin.com. My last name is so easy. People want to make it hard. They want to add ease and tease and asses, but it's just four letters.

A.K.I.N. Akin. Really easy. So Jimmy Akin.com. I also, as you do a number of podcasts, as you mentioned, the best known of them is Jimmy Akin's mysterious world. And every Friday, we look at a mysterious subject from the perspectives of faith and reason and people can hook up with the podcast in any podcast directory.

However, they could go to mysterious.fm or they could go to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Jimmy Akin.

That's an amazing show. It's really great topics. And all of Jimmy's work on Catholic answers really is, I mean, the death that the modern Catholic Internet regular user owes to his work on there is really astounding.

The quality of the answers and the contextual view of how he approaches it is a reason that we really wanted to bring him on for this particular mysterious topic.

And this is something we've wanted to do on the show for a long time is look at the book of Revelation. But we really wanted to bring somebody in maybe a little bit above our pay grade to help us out with this because it is because this book is so hard to interpret.

So many ways and there's so many. There's so many misunderstandings that really is. Yeah. And there's so many obscure and hard to understand images and phrases and historical context that unless you have somebody who's really studied it and is a master apologist like Jimmy, you can get lost in this book. You really can.

So Jimmy, if you would tell us about I think a great place to start is who wrote the book of Revelation because there is some debate even around that topic itself.

You know, it's traditionally a scribe to St. John or St. John of Patmos, but who is this John? Is it the same as the Apostle John or is this a different John?

Well, as you've indicated, there's a debate about that. And not just today, this is a debate that they had in the early church. We know of all the Joening literature. So that's the gospel of John, the book of Revelation, and then the three epistles of John.

This is the only one that actually tells us the name of the person who wrote it. And he says, you know, I, your brother, John. So we know that this book was written by somebody named John, which is a Jewish name. So we know he was Jewish. Also, it's clear he was Jewish because Revelation is very, very heavily informed by the symbolism from the Old Testament. So that would tell us even if we didn't know his name.

But there's a discussion both in the, in the early church and today about which John it is. Now, historically, the, the most common view has been that it was written by John the Apostle or John son of Zebedee.

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