Here is
the Gk text of the passage:
ἐγενόμην ἐν πνεύματι ἐν τῇ κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ
The ISV renders the
passage this way: "I
came to be in the Spirit on the Day of the Lord..."
To the extent that we felt we could do so, the
ISV Committee on Translation sought not to bring any presuppositional
frameworks to any passage being translated. This approach to the text also
excluded bringing translational traditions made merely for the sake of
tradition. (See how we handled John 3:16 for one our best examples of this
policy, by the way.) In all of these things, we attempted to bring the
natural sense of the Gk text. Now when it came to the phrase
ἐν τῇ
κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ, it seemed to us
that this phrase needs to be translated as "Day of the Lord," because the
subject matter of the book is the Day of the Lord as understood in OT
eschatology but completed with respect to the NT addition of "the revelation
of Jesus the Messiah, which God gave him to show his servants" (Revelation
1:1).
The subject matter of
the paragraph in Revelation 1:1 isn't the timing of his vision, that it
happened one day on a Sunday morning! If the entire corpus of the NT was in
place and finished before the destruction of the Temple in 70AD, then
the tradition of calling Sunday the "Lord's day" had not yet been solidified
when John wrote down the Revelation. But even if the early Church was
calling Sunday the "Lord's day," we think that the natural Gk for John to
have used to express this term would be
ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ
τῇ κυριακῇ
(literally, "the day that pertains to the Lord") rather
than the phrase ἐν τῇ
κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ ("the day of the Lord") that he
used in Revelation 1:10. The word order of Revelation 1:10 requires, it
seems to us, to translate the phrase "Day of the Lord" in reference to a
technical term of eschatological art rather than "Sunday morning".
