Revelation 2:12

III. PERGAMOS. The martyr Church, yet too tolerant of licentious heresy, Revelation 2:12-17.

12. Pergamos Sixty miles northeast from Smyrna, would bring our apostle on his circuit to Pergamos, (more correct form of the word, Pergamum,) once the celebrated capital of a small kingdom ruled by a succession of noble monarchs. It was the seat of the temple of Esculapius, and once the possessor of a library of 200,000 volumes, collected by one of its kings, but afterwards added to the Alexandrian library in Egypt. But whatever its ancient intellectual or moral fame, it seems to have been in the time of the Apocalypse the headquarters of antichristianity, where the only martyr by John commemorated suffered death. In the other epistles the Churches are rebuked, in this the city is anathematized.