John the Revalator was exiled to an island, but kept alive by guards, basically the island was his prison, he could write messages out, but they were read by the guards, if they didn’t like it they’d presumably destroy the letter, he communicated through numbered codes and fantastic imagery about ‘dreams’ to disguise his communications, it all fits up very nicely with numerical codes he would have been familiar with, and applied to roman politics that concerned the Christians, it fits very well. This has been the historically accepted view of his works by historians, even Christian hustorians, I’m not going to get into anything beyond telling you it’s widely accepted by professionals, if you want to explore the topic and see the data for yourself you’d need to seek that out on your own, and I’m not interested in convincing you of anything, believe whatever you want, this is only the current widely accepted historical explication, which does fit the data.