Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
intertestamental rabbinical commentaries on the Book of Daniel ... posited that an angel watches over each geographical area (i.e. "the prince of Persia"). There are thus perhaps not only personal angels (cf Peter's angel in Acts 12:15; Jesus' "their angels see God's face" in Matt. 18:10) but also what we might call "geographic angels" as well...
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Perhaps the way to discern whether such notions influenced John in his writing "To the angel of the church in..." would be to know how widespread such ideas may have been in the intertestamental period. Certainly some of these sources influenced the NT: Jude, 2 Peter, and Jesus' parable of Lazarus and the rich man were (likely) informed by uncanonical intertestamental sources.
If we could see "geographic angels" being considered elsewhere (besides what I have cited already) it would strengthen the notion that John referenced something like that (which might also be familiar to his readers); if scant sources are extant then it would weaken the idea. One of the shortcomings of the LSM analyses were that they didn't (to my knowledge) reference any intertestamental/extra-canonical sources. It is widely done by scholars; in contrast Lee's analyses look rather crude ("but they're
LIFE studies!!!").