It almost didn't get included in the NT. Apart from the craziness, there are several ideas within it that were thought by some to be heretical. But there's plenty of stuff like that written down. Revelation is but one of the later entries in the apocalyptic genre, which also includes the Book of Daniel (~200 BC), the Book of Enoch (~100BC) and a large number of others. This stuff was a central part of the culture from which Christianity arose.
I just realised there is perhaps a much simpler translation for the passage from Irenaeus, which I believe would have occurred to me first if the given arguments hadn't put me on a different track. This is still (late) koine, and one of the features of that jargon is that the medium voice is productive, i.e. words need not be lexicalized as medium to be used in that voice. They can be set in the medium instead of the active to signal a greater involvement, reflexive or subjective, of the person acting. The (strong) medium aorist and passive aorist can be the same. So instead of "it hasn't been long since he was seen" or "it hasn't been long since it was seen", the passage could just read "it hasn't been long since he saw (it)". A medium usage of the general verb 'to see' would be entirely apropos for the greater subjective aspect of seeing a vision, as opposed to a profane object in front of one's physical eyes.
This made me laugh. I find it extremely difficult to read Greek with the letters translitterated into Engish. Not used to it at all.
Oooh, I know that feeling. There was a time, years ago, when I could read Russian . . . but only if it was written in cyrillic characters! I needed to be able to transliterate for my job. Then I moved on and without the constant practice, I lost the skill.
That's what happened to me with Hebrew. I learned to read it years ago (though I never got to the level that I have in Greek, or even the level I had at that time), but didn't keep up on it. Today, I don't even remember all the letters. It's on my "projects list" to get back into Hebrew, probably some time next year. When I could read it, though, I had a funny "transliteration" experience. One time, I came across a text in Yiddish. Curious, I wanted to know how close it was to Biblical Hebrew. Answer: not close at all! It's a Germanic dialect (for the most part), written with Hebrew letters. I'm not very good with German, either, but I was able to decipher it, more or less...
I was the same up to a few years ago. Then all the profs in our classics departments switched to transliteration, which was not at all done in the decades before. Apparently, it is a trend that comes to us from US academia. By now, I am used to it, but it took some time.
