Jasper reappears in the Book of Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem with a prominence none of the other eleven breastplate stones receives individually: the wall of the city is described as built of jasper, and the city itself, in the same vision, is said to shine "like a jasper stone, clear as crystal," language that reads oddly against jasper's ordinarily opaque character and has prompted centuries of commentary about whether the biblical author meant a stone modern readers would actually call jasper, or a different, more translucent gem known by that name in antiquity.
Whatever the precise identification, jasper's appearance at both ends of the biblical narrative, on the High Priest's breastplate in Exodus and on the walls of the heavenly city in Revelation, gives it a structural role in Christian scriptural imagery that most other named gemstones in the Bible do not share.
Jasper's placement in Revelation is more insistent than a single mention. It is the first of the twelve foundation stones of the city wall, and earlier in the same book the one seated on the throne is described as being in appearance like a jasper and a sardius, the two stones that close and open the Exodus breastplate list, which several commentators have read as a deliberate echo rather than as a coincidence of vocabulary.
The difficulty the passage creates for identification is the same one it creates for translation. If the stone in view is transparent, the word cannot mean what modern mineralogy means by jasper, and the usual scholarly resolution is that the Greek iaspis of the first century covered a range of chalcedony that included translucent material now filed under other names.