Which made me wonder. Even it wouldn’t be the reason that many people refer to the book by that name today, it could be an example to support the usage other than (what I had thought) mere confusion with many New Testament books that are plurals.
Unfortunately I’m unable to find such a version looking through online sources. Most that reference a 1380 version have ‘Apocalips’ as the title and first word of the book.
Now Tyndale, a few centuries later, has ‘Revelation of St. John’ (or ‘Reuelation’, if you prefer) so by then it must have been the common name for the book. (Although I think Douay-Rheims uses ‘Apocalypse’ to be more like the Vulgate.)
I can’t help much, but this I can answer for German. It’s “Die Offenbarung des Johannes” or simply “Johannesoffenbarung”, that means St. John’s revelation, singular.
I am not sure that you are going to get a definitive answer.
The 1380 Tyndale preceded the printing of the Textus Receptus of Erasmus (1516) by almost 140 years. That was the first widespread printing of the New Testament in Greek. With the wide dissemination of the Textus Receptus, there was a huge interest in translating the original Greek into the vernacular (local language) throughout Europe. It would have probably been in that period, (early 16th century, on the cusp of the Reformation), that a more particular translation of the Greek in its singular form would have become the standard practice.
On the other hand, with the many revelations found within the book, it is easy to see how more casual references to it would have picked up the plural form. Are there any bibles subsequent to 1516 that use the plural in the printed title?
According to the OED, Wycliff uses “revelation” to refer to the last NT book, but they don’t suggest he give is the the name “Revelations”. He has a marginal note which reads “Heere endith the Apocalips, or Reuelacioun of Seynt Joon the euangelist”. “Reuelacioun” is singular, not plural, and Wycliff probably includes it because he assumes his readers won’t know what “Apocalypse” means.
“Revelations”, plural, is first cited with reference to the scriptural work from 1450 but, again, it’s a descriptor, not a title. (" Þe holy apostle seynt Iohn…in þe booke of his reuelaciouns þat is cleped þe Apocalips, seiþ þat he seiȝ a best, [etc.].") The first cite which uses “Revelations” as a title for the work is from 1565, and there are numerous cites for this from the eighteenth century onwards. According to the OED this use of “Revelations” to refer to the NT work is “now regarded as informal and by some as incorrect”.
Thanks for the replies. I was able to stop by the library and take a look at (probably an older edition) of the OED that had slightly less information. It also only had the first cite for usage as the book’s name as 1591, which is probably what the Online Etymology Dictionary relied on. Their use of the plural in the ‘apocalypse’ entry is likely an error.
Coverdale is cited as the first to use it for a heading/title, which may have come from translations into other vernacular languages. (Coverdale apparently relied more on those, as he didn’t use the Greek). Though the same cites UDS pointed out show that people were using the word in reference to the events described prior to him.
I haven’t seen any reference to a translation that specifically uses it for the title. It seems it would have to come from the 18th-19th Century, when the usage would have been unremarkable, but the success of the King James may have inhibited any alternate usage.
That is not in dispute. The question was “Why/when did the singular name Revelation begin showing up in the plural?” It is not plural in the Greek and it was not plural in the Vulgate Latin translation.
Well, the word “revelation” can either mean the totality of what is revealed, or a specific thing that is revealed. Hence you can consider the Revelation of St. John to contain a number of distinct revelations, and in that sense it can be called a book of revelations. And it is so called in the 1450 quote I gave above (from the OED). But that quote, while called the work a “book of revelations”, explicitly doesn’t name it the Book of Revelations; it says that it’s named the Apocalypse.
The OED has a couple of quotes from the 16th and 17th centuries where people talke about “his Apocalypse or Book of Revelations”, or similar wording. I suspect what’s going on here is that the writer offers the alternative because he assumed that his readers may not know the meaning of the word “apocalypse”
In short, when people talk about Johns “book of revelations”, or simply his “revelations”, it’s not necessarily clear whether they are using that as a name, or simply as a descriptor. But it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that someone used it as a descriptor, but his listeners/readers took it to be a name, and there therefore grew up a belief that there existed a scriptural book of that name. And by the eighteenth century people are definitely using it as an alternative name - e.g. it turns up in scriptural citations like “Revelations xii.6” (from a 1791 quote).
But was the usage ever completely accepted, formally? Was there ever an English-language Bible which printed the title of this work as the “Book of Revelations” or the “Revelations of St John”? I don’t know.
Perhaps it came from the original title “Apocalypse” ending in an /s/ sound, interpreting it as a plural ending, and expecting that to continue in Latin-derived English with the same plural ending. All I know is the Catholic Bible called it Apocalypse and KJV called it Revelation.