To the messenger of the church in Ephesus, let it be written: Thus says the Holder of the Seven Stars in His Right Hand, the Walker in the Middle of the Seven Lampstands of Gold.
I know your deeds and your toil and endurance, and that you are not able to bear the evil ones. And you have tested those calling themselves apostles but are not, and you have found them false. And you have endurance and have borne for the sake of My Name and have not grown fatigued.
But I have against you that you have let go your first devotion. Remember therefore whence you have fallen and do the first deeds. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, should you not repent. But you have this, that you detest the deeds of the Nikolaitans, which I also detest.
Who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
To the victorious: I will give him to eat from the wood of life that is in God's Paradise.
***
To the messenger of the church in Smyrna, let it be written: Thus says the Foremost and the Final, Who Became Corpse and Lived.
I know your oppression and your destitution -- but you are wealthy -- and the vilification of those calling themselves Ioudaians and are not, rather a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to endure. See! The slanderer is about to cast some of you into prison so that you might be tested, so that you shall have oppression ten days. Be trustworthy unto death and I will give you the crown of life.
Who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
To the victorious: He shall not be wronged by the second death.
[Revelation 2:1-11, my very rough translation. 'Messenger' pretty clearly means the representative of one church to another, serving as a sort of liaison or courier between them, but thinking of this messenger as an angel, which it can also mean, is natural here. My suspicion is that this kind of correspondence was fairly common among the very early churches and the book is here making use of this already-recognized genre to relate the churches in Asia Minor to the heavenly church. Each begins with a command to write, then has an attribution of a title to the sender, then an official record of the state of the church, then an encouragement to hear, then a final note, "to the one who overcomes", providing a promise of action. (Although there is some variation on this, particularly with regard to order.)
All of our knowledge of the Nicolaitans comes from the brief mentions in the book of Revelation in the letters to Ephesus and Pergamum. The consistent later tradition is that they were followers of Nikolaos, one of the original seven Hellenistic Jewish disciples in Acts 6 who were selected to make sure that the disciples of Hellenistic Jewish background were not discriminated against by those of Hebraic Jewish background. In some stories, he is himself the founder of the sect, either because of his general laxity or his divorcing of his wife; in others, he was himself entirely innocent, but other people twisted his preaching in a libertine direction. Revelation does not directly say what the problem with the Nicolaitans was, but they are associated with other groups that ate food sacrificed to idols and engaged in sexual morality, and the almost universal tradition is that they believed that Christians could indulge themselves in sexual acts without proper regard for marriage.
Xylou is most naturally translated 'tree', but it literally means any wooden thing, and elsewhere in the New Testament specifically refers to the cross. I find the promise to the victorious of Smyrna to be interesting; it says that he shall not be adikethe, which means 'injured' in the literal sense of the term -- acted unjustly toward, having one's right violated, having wrong done to one. One could translate the title in the second letter as 'Died and Lived' and that would be perfectly fine; I have deliberately chosen to translate it literally. Ioudaious could be translated 'Jews' or 'Judeans' (which are originally the same word), but I actually wonder if there is a deliberate contrast with the Nicolaitans. If any of the traditional attribution is true, the Nicolaitans would have been a heretical and disruptive group in the Church who were of Hellenistic background; it's possible to interpret the Ioudaians as a heretical and disruptive group in the Church who were from a Hebraic background, and thus associated with the Jewish Temple in Judea. A lot depends in interpretation on how late one takes this terminology; the later it is, the more likely it means 'Jews as opposed to Christians', while the earlier it is, the more likely it means 'Those of Judean background as opposed to those of Hellenistic background'. Diabolos can be translated as 'devil' or 'slanderer'; either would make sense here -- the letter has mentioned both Satan and the vilification of the Ioudaians, so one could take it to mean either a supernatural action by the devil moving society to persecution or human lies leading to unjust imprisonment. Indeed, it's entirely possible that both are intended simultaneously.]
