John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices

On May 12, Debbie left a comment on my post "Under" saying:

Didn't all prophets at some point emerge from a cave?

The next day, May 13, I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, published May 11, with the headline "'There, It Couldn't Be More Clear,' Announces John After Finishing Revelation." It begins thus:

PATMOS — The Apostle John emerged from his cave earlier this week feeling confident that he couldn't have been more clear in his description of the revelation he'd received.

There is no reference in the Bible to John of Patmos ever having been in a cave, but apparently there is an extrabiblical tradition to that effect. The wording corresponds almost exactly to Debbie's.

The whole article is about how sure John is that he has expressed himself with perfect clarity, which should "keep anyone from coming up with weird interpretations" of his book. The joke is of course that Revelation is notoriously cryptic and confusing and has generated thousands of mutually incompatible interpretations. Calling it "clear" is so obviously false that it's comical.

On the night of May 13, some hours after reading the Bee article, I began listening to the latest installment in the series with Latter-day Chad on Zion Media:

At the 15-minute mark, host Shane Baldwin says:

Literally, John himself visited me when I was in prison in 2015, and he taught me this, and it's plain, and it's simple. And Revelation is, the Book of Revelation is one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read, once you have the codex.

I don't know what he means by codex here; I think it was a slip of the tongue, and he meant something like "they key to the code." Codex just means "book," though -- a modern-style book with pages as opposed to a scroll. Whatever Baldwin intended to say, what he actually said is that all you need in order to understand the Book of Revelation -- to experience it as "one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read" -- is to have the book itself.

The Bee article says the same thing:

When asked by a scribe the exact identity of the beast with ten horns and seven heads, John sighed with impatience and said to just read what he wrote.

"It's literally spelled out," said John. "All you have to do is read it. I can't make it simpler than that."

And, although the historical John would almost certainly have written on a scroll, the illustration accompanying the Bee article shows him with a codex.