Who is doing this, and the principles it is done on.
My name is Jon. I hold a ministerial diploma, and behind that are about twenty years of study and of personal ministry — but no formal ministry position, no pulpit and no institution standing behind me. Jesus went after the lost sheep one at a time Luke 15:4 and told those who followed Him to make disciples Matthew 28:19. That has been my aim too, and this site is part of it.
I am saying that plainly so you know what you are reading and can weigh it accordingly.
This is the principle everything else here rests on. Where a passage is hard, the answer is looked for in scripture itself — in how the same words are used elsewhere, in what the passage is quoting, in what is said about the same subject somewhere else — rather than in a system brought in from outside.
So what you find in these notes is not a collection of opinions I happen to hold. Each one is meant to be traceable: here is the word, here is where else it is used, here is the passage behind it, and here is why that leads where it leads. That is also why the notes are colour-coded, and why the ones that go beyond reporting are marked as interpretation and kept in their own colour.
If you see a hole in something here that scripture does not support, please tell me. Not a difference of taste — a place where the text will not carry the weight I have put on it. Write to jon.pjcomputing@gmail.com. I would rather be corrected than be comfortable, and the work is a draft on purpose.
As a general pattern, the first time scripture uses a word or raises a subject, there is something significant in how it does it — a lesson set down at the outset that the rest of the Bible then builds on.
The clearest example is grace. The Hebrew word chen, favour or grace, appears for the first time in the whole Bible here:
“And Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD.” Genesis 6:8
The first man in scripture to find grace is Noah — and the name Noah means rest. His father names him two chapters earlier and says so outright, that this one will bring us relief from our work and from the painful labour of our hands Genesis 5:29. So the first time grace appears, rest is what finds it. Not effort, not achievement, not a man who had earned anything. Rest found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
I take that as deliberate, and as a key laid down early for everything scripture later says about grace and about rest — including a promise that a rest still remains for the people of God.
Scripture has one subject before it has any other, and He is a person. Paul puts it as an intention, and says it covers everything without exception:
“…so that in all things He might be preeminent.” Colossians 1:18
So when a passage can be read as being about Jesus or as being about something else, that is not a neutral choice for me. He is the truth the scriptures are for, and reading them as though He were one topic among many gets the book wrong at the root. This is also why the translation on this site is called The Unveiling of Jesus — that is what the first line of Revelation says the whole book is.
The Bible is a composite whole. Much as the law is spoken of as one thing rather than a list of rules, the whole of scripture is the word — with the definite article. One word. And one person:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
It is made of many books, by many hands, over a great stretch of time, and divided into chapters and verses that its writers never saw. But it behaves as one thing: it quotes itself, answers itself, picks a word up in one book and puts it down in another, and sets things in place at the beginning that are not resolved until the end. It is many verses and one word.
The nearest comparison I know is God Himself. Three — and also one. Not three separate things added together, and not one thing with three names. The Bible is like that: many parts, genuinely distinct, and genuinely one.
Practically, this is why nothing here is read in isolation. If Revelation is quoting Daniel, then Daniel is not background material, it is the same word speaking. That is why the margins are full of markers, and why the green ones matter most: they show you where the one word is referring to itself.
A few friends had been asking me about Revelation. I had always seen it as something of a mystery myself — a great deal of symbolism and imagery, and hard to really understand. Then, when I finally sat down to read it again, I noticed that the book pronounces a blessing on the one who reads it and on those who hear it and keep it Revelation 1:3, and that at the very end John is told not to seal it up Revelation 22:10 — where Daniel, shown something similar, had been told to seal his Daniel 12:4. So I concluded it must be understandable. It was not given in order to stay shut.
Someone will point out that the word there is keep, not understand. But you cannot keep what you could never follow — and the scriptures say it both ways: “Give me understanding, and I will keep Your law” Psalm 119:34, and “I understand more than the elders, because I have kept Your precepts” Psalm 119:100. You need enough to start, and the keeping teaches you the rest. And when Ezra read the law aloud to the people, understanding is exactly what is recorded as the result Nehemiah 8:8.
I had just finished another project using Claude, so it struck me as an interesting thing to try: use a language model to work through Revelation directly from the Greek, and put it into modern English that an ordinary reader could actually follow.
Then fairly early on, while we were working through the text, Claude mentioned something I had not known — and it is probably written somewhere on the internet already — that estimates run to around five hundred echoes of the Hebrew scriptures in this one book. That set me thinking. Jesus came as a baby and grew up reading those scriptures. So of course a revelation about Him Revelation 1:1 would be full of echoes of them. It could hardly be otherwise.
So we began marking them, to make the book easier again to read — and that is what grew into this website.
I hope you enjoy it.
This site is about Jesus, and it is full of your scriptures. That is not incidental to it. The book I have been translating barely writes a sentence that is not made out of them, and the work of these pages has mostly been showing where.
Thank you for being faithful with the oracles of God Romans 3:2. They were entrusted to you and you kept them, at a cost, for a very long time. That is not an abstraction here: when this translation needs to check the Hebrew behind a verse, it reads the Leningrad Codex — a manuscript your scribes copied, counted and guarded. Everyone using this site is in their debt, and I most of all.
My hope is that you would see in those scriptures what I see in them, that they testify Jesus is the Messiah John 5:39. If you do not, then I hope we can disagree respectfully, and I am glad you are here reading. Thank you.
Israel has made the gold calf. Moses goes back up the mountain and says this:
“And now — if You would forgive their sin. And if not, blot me out, please, from Your book, which You have written.” Exodus 32:32
He offers to be struck out himself if that is what it costs for them to be forgiven. And God refuses him: whoever has sinned against Me, him I will blot out of My book Exodus 32:33. The answer is a principle, not a rebuke — each one answers for his own — and it is exactly why the offer could not be taken. To stand in for someone, you must have nothing of your own to answer for.
Only an unblemished lamb can be offered Exodus 12:5, and Moses was not one. He had killed the Egyptian and hidden him in the sand Exodus 2:12 — taking the rescue of his people into his own hands rather than waiting on God. Stephen says exactly that: Moses supposed his brothers would understand that God was giving them deliverance by his hand, and they did not Acts 7:25.
Later, someone made that same offer and it was accepted. That, I think, is what Moses was reaching for and could not reach. Where Moses had acted by his own hand, Jesus said “not My will, but Yours be done” Luke 22:42 — and then offered the sacrifice without blemish or spot 1 Peter 1:19.
The wording carries it. The Greek scriptures put Moses’ request in the verb exaleiphō, to wipe out; a psalm asks for the wicked to be wiped out of the book of the living Psalm 69:28; and in this book Jesus uses the same verb, negated, to the assembly at Sardis — I will never wipe his name out of the book of life Revelation 3:5. A few chapters on, the book is named as belonging to the Lamb who was slaughtered Revelation 13:8. Paul makes Moses’ offer over again for his own people Romans 9:3, and he cannot make it good either.
At the very end, the book and the tree stand in one sentence Revelation 22:19. There is a great deal about that tree on this site. It is in the garden at the beginning Genesis 2:9; it is what is promised to the first of the seven assemblies Revelation 2:7; and at the close it is growing on both sides of the river, bearing twelve crops, with its leaves for the healing of the nations Revelation 22:2. The book you are written in and the tree you are free to eat from arrive together.
The translation has its own page on method — the four kinds of note, what each colour is allowed to claim, and what I could not do. Read “How this works” in The Unveiling →