Jesus Christ's unveiling, which God gave Him to show to His servants what ought to happen with speed. And He made it known, having sent through His messenger to His servant John, who testified to the Word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, as much as he gazed at. Blessed those reading and those hearing the words of this prophecy and guarding what in it has been written, for near the season!
John, to the seven churches in Asia: Grace to you, and peace, from the Being and the Was and the To Come, and from the seven spirits in the sight of His throne, and from Jesus Christ, the Faithful Witness, the Firstborn of the dead, and the Ruler of the kings of the earth. To the one devoted to us and loosing us from our sins through His blood (and He has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father), to Him glory and rule to the eons of eons. Amen. See, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, and those who pierced Him, and because of Him all the races of the earth will lament. Absolutely! Amen!
I am the Alpha and the Omega, source and consummation, says the Lord God, the Being and the Was and the To Come, the All-ruler.
[Revelation 1:1-8. My very, very, very rough translation. In general, one should always be wary of translations of Revelation that do not convey how weird the original language it is -- the book is famous for how utterly weird its Greek is, somehow managing to be both slangy and technical, filled with extremely ungrammatical phrases that seem to be entirely deliberate. This little opening is filled with both auditory and visual terms. Notable is that John represents himself as giving testimony to Christ's testimony, but he also literally says he stared at it. 'The Being' (Ho On) is a divine title we find elsewhere, in the Septuagint, but combining it with The Was Being (Ho En) and The Going to Be (Ho Erchomenos, literally, the Coming) is unusual.]
